Gigabit wired MediaMVP?

[LehighBri]

I have Hauppauge's MediaMVP and love it, but my gigabit ethernet network at my house sure is underused. Does anyone know if there are any gigabit extenders planned for the future? Has Hauppauge given any indication they will be releasing an updated MediaMVP that supports gigabit ethernet given their product is so old?

[Lucas]

The MVP doesn't need a gigabit interface. The SD videos can easily be transferred over the 100mbit network so if it would be included it would never be utilised to the full extent.

I also run my mvp on gigabit LAN.

[jkf]

Yeah, even with HD, there's no need for a client to use gigabit.
An HD video stream shouldn't be more than about 30 Megabit or so, so there's no need for the client's network interface to be Gigabit. Any Gigabit switch should interoperate with 10/100 devices.

But, if you have multiple clients accessing HD streams from your server, then you will benefit from a gigabit network, as the combined data streaming from the server could easily exceed a 100 megabit.

[paulbeers]

I agree. For clients there is no need for anything better than 100mb. This is why I bought a switch that has mostly 100mb ports but has 2 gigabit ports that I can hook my server into.

[stanger89]

OTA HD is <= 19.4Mbps (or ~1/5 100TX)
HD DVD is <= about 36Mbps (IIRC)
Blu-ray is <= about 48Mbps (IIRC)

Even an HD extender would have no use for GigE, unless they decided to do the decoding on the server side (but that would be frought with problems).

[stevech]

I doubt the MVP would have a processor/bus fast enough to exploit gigE. On PCs, I think that PCIe is required; PCI gigE NICs can't get enough speed on the older PCI bus.

My gigE speeds are less than 100Mbps between PCs unless both have pretty fast CPUs. TCP stack processing and data-moves. Best I've gotten with memory-to-memory (no disk) for two PCI based PCs is about 400Mbps

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by stevech

I doubt the MVP would have a processor/bus fast enough to exploit gigE.

Well, it's decoder can only handle 8Mbps MPEG-2 according to the specs. My point though was, there isn't any consumer video format that requires even close to 100Mbps of bandwidth, let alone 1Gbps.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by stevech

I doubt the MVP would have a processor/bus fast enough to exploit gigE. On PCs, I think that PCIe is required; PCI gigE NICs can't get enough speed on the older PCI bus.

My gigE speeds are less than 100Mbps between PCs unless both have pretty fast CPUs. TCP stack processing and data-moves. Best I've gotten with memory-to-memory (no disk) for two PCI based PCs is about 400Mbps

Actually, PCI bus is rated at 133 MB/sec which Gigabit is only 125 MB/sec so yes old PCI bus did/does have the speed to handle unfortunately it wouldn't leave much left for everything on the PCI bus.

[stevech]

I suspect my 400Mbps (bits/sec) limit was constrained by the CPU overhead in windows in handling TCP. I don't have a test program to push memory to memory large blocks using UDP. Kind of moot anyway.

Someday, TCP will move out into the silicon chips. It has done so already for chips used in embedded microprocessors, e.g., WIZNET

[paulbeers]

I would also suspect that your hard drives are a limitation. Unless you are running some sort of raid, most hard drives only have a sustained rate of about 60 MB/s which is only about 480 mb/s and that is only if their a sequential reads. If you are serving more than one stream at a time, then the thoroughput drops considerably.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I would also suspect that your hard drives are a limitation. Unless you are running some sort of raid, most hard drives only have a sustained rate of about 60 MB/s which is only about 480 mb/s and that is only if their a sequential reads. If you are serving more than one stream at a time, then the thoroughput drops considerably.

that speed I spoke of is memory-to-memory (no disk I/O), just to see what the speeds at TCP could be. Used QCheck freeware.