Placeshifter Hardware transcoding

[pschweig]

Hi

I have played around with the placeshifter and I found that it was quite usable when set to dynamic streaming. However my CPU (pentium m 740) shot to 83% when transcoding the video on the fly. Also when I am using both my freeview tuners at once my CPU shoots to 80-odd%. So I am guessing that watching freeview channels over placeshifter would cause problems for my cpu

Are there any plans for support of the latest avivo gfx cards which have hardware transcoding? I'm sure nVidia Purevideo cards have something similar.

Dual core Merom or Yonah cpus would no doubt be much more adept at transcoding than my pentium m. However seeing as the gfx card supports this in hardware it seems a pity not to use it

thanks
paul

[SHS]

The problem with that idea is they have buy new ATI series graphics chips, from low-end X1300 to high-end X1800 XT.
2nd problem is all review that had some data on it are using very fast system which not a good compares in real performance so there for I think more Hype then any thing else.
What would be more adept at transcoding is Pure Hardware Transcode.

[mikejaner]

I think the easiest way for this to be done is for you to get a DualCore chip. Sagetv is already Multithreaded according to Opus4, so I would think the transcoding would be done by the second processor if you had that type of setup.

[rickgillyon]

But for most people a dual-core chip means a new motherboard, which if you have a special case/cube may mean a new case, extra cooling etc. Whereas hardware transcoding (perhaps by adding one of those Plextor gadgets?) could take the heat off your current CPU.

Personally, my CPU seems to manage, with each DVB recording only taking about 3% CPU.

[ldavis]

Good to see this as a point of discussion. For HDTV, I think many of us will be left out in the cold or be forced by purchase quite an expensive PC upgrade (or just an new PC). In the end that is too steep a price for me. Hopefully we can get some type of hardware encoding, but if not I have a less conventional (and ultimatley less elegant) solution. I already have adequate antenna coverage, so I use a recently retired Hauppauge 150. I add the analog channels as required to the channel list and remove them when not needed. Analog video quality is terrible but for streaming on the internet, it is not really noticable.

[bcjenkins]

I took a quick look but couldn't figure out which codec Sage is using for placeshifting. Can the codec be changed to use one tied to an mpeg-4 hardware encoding card? I haven't begun to use place shifting yet due to bandwidth issues, but when I get that resolved (FIOS!) I will. I would definitely throw an add on card or USB/Firewire device on to offload the transcoding.

B

[pschweig]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

I think the easiest way for this to be done is for you to get a DualCore chip

Undoubtedly that would be the easiest solution. However only a couple of months ago I invested in a pentium m based shuttle and I'm hoping (as is my bank balance ) that it'll last me for a little while. It'd be far preferable to drop a £80 pci-express card in than to upgrade to dual core

Originally Posted by SHS

The problem with that idea is they have buy new ATI series graphics chips, from low-end X1300 to high-end X1800 XT.

Do you mean sage would have to buy the cards? For their testing? I guess they could invest in one avivo card and rely on willing beta testers for the rest.

Originally Posted by SHS

2nd problem is all review that had some data on it are using very fast system which not a good compares in real performance so there for I think more Hype then any thing else.

True - I'm not sure what the actual state of avivo is at the moment. The guys at doom9 have been playing with the avivo video converter (for H.264) with mixed results.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=104157

And according to this article on anandtech the transcoding isn't even gpu accelerated yet. That was written dec 2005 so I'm not sure if anything's changed since then

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2645&p=5