> > So, you will just have to try and see! Make sure your harddrives can > > sustain > 25MB/s (a little overhead for seeks, etc.), install the rawio > > patches for the kernel, write a capture driver that can use rawio to > > capture to a raw partition on the HDD without too much kernel overhead, > > get a motherboard with really low latency PCI arbitration, and hope... > > Wow. That's a bit complicated, now, isn't it? :) You couldn't use rawio on a software raid0, though, could you? I don't think so. I suppose if your CPU is fast enough you could get away without rawio - the CPU is probably the strongest link in the chan these days. > > Sorry, in the end I haven't really answered your question. In theory it > > is definitely possible, but I have a horrible suspision that the > > arbitration latency on the PCI bus is going to keep theory from > > becomming practice... > > This is a bit off topic, but I've seen the Asus K7V (VIA KT133) > consistently score perfect 500MB/sec of memory-to-cpu bandwidth. Can > anyone vouch for the PCI latency with this chipset? I don't know about the KT133, but the KX133 had the worst latencies I've seen since Intel's first PCI 2.1 chipset (can't remember what it was called). The KT133 seems a bit better though. A simple test would be to capture to ram, and then copy directly to the video framebuffer. This should simulate the PCI load of capture->ram->hdd. -justin
