I'd like to build a system that is able to capture multiple video sources at once (5 sources), and write it to MPEG in real-time.

Any suggestions for hardware? Should I go for dedicated MPEG video capture boards that do it in hardware (do they write to dev/whatever ??) or should I read the data via mplayer and dump it to mpeg in software?
Currently I intend to save to MP4.

BTW: this is not meant to be a home PVR!

Ram. Lots of it. And a raid.

It would'nt matter if you got a camera that produced mp4s for you with no cpu burden whatsoever on your computer. 5 streaming video sources is going bottom out your hard drive, fairly quick. So you want a raid for both performance and space.

Mmmh. Ok then. Let's assume I bolt together a fairly high power AMD64 X2 system and hook a simple yet fast SATA2 RAID 0 to it. MPEG files get saved in chunks of 1 hour (any idea on how to do the chunking) and then moved by a background process to a larger fileserver.

So far, would it work?

And then, what is your recommendation for the actual video Input. A cheapo PCI video capture card x5 or a dedicated MPEG card?

What is this idea with the video camera?? I have a few video composite cables here that need to get into the machine...

After some calculations:

the setup would produce 11MB x 5 per minute. Is SATA2 the bottleneck here, CPU or just storage?

So thats 55 mb/ minute or slightly less than a megabyte per second.

Most harddrives can probably handle sustained writing around 50 mb/s.

Thats 50 more times than the amount you're writing. So I guess storage would be your primary bottleneck. Yes you could quickly run out of space, producing 1 meg/sec.

a 2 hour video. 7200 seconds, around 7 gigs of space.
Thats DVD quality video you have there then.

You could saturate a typical 250 gig harddrive with 15 dvds basically.

Maybe you don't even really need much horsepower, unless you plan on editing.

Now that's a comment. Thanks!

Any recommendations for video hardware -> software? As I am not up to digitizing DVDs but a tuner/video signal...