On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Some poser wrote: > Jim, you post enough crap from Slashdot to know differently. People are > doing it. I have a whitebox machine (AMD, 256M ram, cheap TV card, 20G > disk, $300 a year ago) that does it. It isn't a big deal.
Speaking of posting crap...and don't send me private email. Which is irrelevant, what is the CPU speed of the box? -THAT- is what is important...raw processing power. An old 486dx/80 running Linux will store video but only at a handfull of fps. In any real world system not only are you going to pull the raw data off the tv card (30fps@4Mb/frame@60s~=.7G for 1m of video) but also use a codec to compress it. Then you've also got to move the bits onto the hard drive. All without throwing any interrupts that will cause a dropped frame or cause a codec problem. And don't forget that's at the default television resolution (which is less than 640x480). If you want to scale it up to 1024*768 you've got a lot of interpollating to throw in there as well. And then if you want HDTV or Widescreen (Firefly in widescreen is awesome!) you've got an even heavier load. This lets you put roughly 45m of video (along with the audio) on a standard 600M CD-R (and if you want to burn the CD-R or watch the stream at the same time you're encoding it while you surf the net and handle email and run your firewall... you can increase the cpu requirements considerably). There -is- a big deal and it went right over your head. Just any old cheap box will -not- do video -effectively-. Then again, maybe you like watching 320x200. You should have tried this back in the late 80's with a single frame VHS recorder and an Amiga Video Toaster...one frame at a time, thank god for AREXX ;) -- ____________________________________________________________________ We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------