[MPlayer-users] Dream video machine or nightmare?

[Simen Thoresen]

Hi Yan,

My mplayer-posting-access is currently somewhat messed up, so you're not 
getting this over the list. Please feel free to answer on the list, tho.

While I too have not /done/ this, I'm wondering what you have against 
compression. An uncompressed video-stream is huge and will tax IO, while a 
hardware-compressed video-stream is comparably puny. I'm using Hauppage PVR 
250-cards, which deliver a low-bandwidth MPEG2-stream to the system. I would 
be surprised if even modest harware would have major issues with 4x 15mbps 
(7MB/s hd-speed) video streams. The quality of the compression is (imho)
good enough for post-processing work, and most cheap BT8x8-clones produce 
more noisy output than what I'm seeing from the Hauppage card.

I'd also go for a sriped working-disk like the other poster wrote, and then 
copy to a mirror for postprocessing. Depending on the size of your data, you 
could even have one stripe-partition and one mirrored partition on the same 
drive, provided you don't simultaniously copy one set while grabbing another.

Still - this sounds fun. Please keep us informed :-)
-S
-- 
Simen Thoresen, Wulfkit Support, Dolphin ICS
http://www.tysland.com/~simentt/cluster