Es schrieb Jason Miller: > > Hey, > I was just planning on using apps that use v4l2, like XAWTV. Just for > basic TV viewing and recording. Say, is a 1ghz athlon tbird enough > horse power to record 640x480 and encode in mpeg2 in realtime (or any > descent codec for that matter)? Or do you really need something with > more horse power? > Hi Jason, since some time a XP 2400 is here around and also 2.6.0-testx. All kind of recordings I still do with my 1 GHz tbird and the ancient 2.4.20, the one I had to learn to love. Xawtv's streamer will record 640x480 mjpeg with 16 bit stereo easily. The 60000 frames "lamed" mpeg4 I have reported in sync with mencoder/v4l2 at full resolution on the 1 GHz-tbird, that was also not a joke. You will need some RAM (384MB is here) for the enormous ringbuffers some apps build up to keep a/v sync. If you drive it to the limit, cron daemons with absurd high priorities may cause some framedrops and it may also be an advantage to use a lightweight window manager in this case. For daily use, that all doesn't matter. For months now I am using the divx variants from nvrec and do timeshift playback with xine on the 1GHz machine. The output goes to a ordinary tv with the nvidia driver on a GF4 without any annoying problems. For high resolution broadcast and a projector or viewing on the monitor tvtime, even with the commercials you get included, of course will be unbeatable, but we don't have it here and I prefere the timeshift option for tvout at the moment. So have also a look at nvrec-v4l2, mencoder-cvs (guess the v4l2 patch is in there), ffmpeg-cvs and maybe even mp4live (mpeg4ip-0.9.9) for special cases. The FV3K you will keep anyhow, even you buy later a new machine with a tv-card included. Greetings Hermann
