[MPlayer-users] Dream video machine or nightmare?

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 03:15:21PM -0700, Yan Seiner wrote:
> I have a project where we're trying to capture 4 video signals.  For 
> various reasons, we want to use 1 box if possible.  Disk I/O and CPU are 
> going to be limiting factors.
> 
> Based on my experience with video capture, I need to be able to capture 
> at 640x480 resolution, possibly with no compression if I can get enough 
> disk space and disk I/O.  The total length of video is going to be about 
> 30-60 minutes at a time.  The signal is NTSC, 30 fps.
> 
> So, I'm trying to put together a machine with the following specs:
> 
> 4 video capture cards (BT848)
> SMP CPU
> SCSI or SATA RAID (I need redunancy; two fast drives in a RAID-1 rather 
> than RAID-0 - I can't afford to lose this data)  I might consider 
> RAID-10....

You can't capture to RAID-0 and then store it on something more
reliable later? I really doubt the HDD will fail _during_ capture, and
if it does, it will probably slow you down enough that your capture
will be messed up anyway even with RAID-1...

> Could anyone with some more video grabbing experience suggest some 
> hardware?  CPU, mobo, SCSI/SATA controller, etc?  I am partial to AMD, 
> but don't mind shelling out the $$ for Intel if it's worth it.

You'd be an idiot to shell out the money for Intel. It's a ton slower
than AMD. Our benchmarks show that 2-2.5 GHz Intel is about the same
speed as 1-1.2 GHz AMD, IIRC (for certain video applications, not
necessarily the same as your config, but I'm confident that the
fastest AMD you can get will be A LOT faster than the fastest Intel).

> Also, has anyone done this?  Is this feasible?  I want to use mencoder 
> to capture the raw data, then post-process it to compress for storage 
> and distribution.

Never done it, but it should be possible...

Rich