A few placeshifting questions....

[blade]

How much cpu power is required to do the transcoding? Does it have to be done on the actual Sage Server or can my client box handle it?

On the playback side, how much power is required? I'm assuming about as much as a mpeg2 or divx file.

Also does the video card make a big difference for playback when using placeshifting? I guess my question is does the video card's deinterlacing abilities make a difference or is all of that somehow taken care of during the transcoding? I'm just curious if I would need a really good video card in the remote machine in order to get decent pq output to a TV or would a less expensive video card do the job.

Finally how does the quality of placeshifting compare to playing back the mpeg over the local network using 6xxx series Nvidia cards and the PureVideo decoders.

[thatdude90210]

I'm using a P4 2.53 on the server and it's using about 40% to 55% cpu when transcoding. Enough power is still left that I can use the server to watch tv.

For placeshifter client, I've ran it on a p3 700 with a rage128 video card and it ran fine. I'm currently using it on a 2.13 celeron with the onboard s3 unichrome video and it looks pretty good.

The quality depends on your bandwidth -- the server uploaded speed and the placeshifter client download speed. I'm pretty happy with the quality for most programming, but can get blocky during fast stuff like sports shows.