Capturing multiple video sources in real-time to MPEG
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! |
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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? |
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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... |
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