dannychuckle
03-01-2006, 5:47 PM
I've got myself a kinda new project, but it also ties in with me finally finishing my compactflash mediacentre. I want to build a fairly cheap Mediacentre pc that can sit behind the TV quietly and pick up and allow me to record digital & analog freeview TV. I want it to also play music from my server, but thats pretty straight forward.
I'm wanting to build this around something like a tualatin P3 as they run at around 23 Watts max so it'll be really easy to keep cool and quiet. I know that wont be powerful enough to do much compression on the fly, but as HD space is so cheap these days I can stick a 200-300GB drive in there and it can use pretty much all of that for recording. I'd like it to then compress whatever it's recorded to something that maintains the good quality, but comresses it well so I assume that'd be mpeg4 or divx? It could do this overnight, or whenever the recording has finished...
This is all very new to me, and i've done some reading, but there's so much info out there and a lot of it isn't up to date any more, and a lot of it is biased, so I'm trying to get a feel for whether what I've suggested above is possible/plausable/easy and some pointers for info, programs etc.
I have found ShowShifter which seems to do the whole record in mjpeg format and then compress to divx later.
Ok, I guess my main questions are:
Do all TV cards give the option of recording as mjpeg files (i'm looking at getting something like the Hauppauge WINTV-HVR 1100 which is £50 on delivered from ebuyer)
Will something like a P3 1.2GHz with 512MB RAM be up to the job?
Would I be better going for a 7200RPM HD over a quieter 5200RPM drive for initial mjpeg recordings?
I'd probably go for 1GB RAM, but not if I don't need to.
any suggestions or comments will be appreciated!
cheers
Danny
I'm wanting to build this around something like a tualatin P3 as they run at around 23 Watts max so it'll be really easy to keep cool and quiet. I know that wont be powerful enough to do much compression on the fly, but as HD space is so cheap these days I can stick a 200-300GB drive in there and it can use pretty much all of that for recording. I'd like it to then compress whatever it's recorded to something that maintains the good quality, but comresses it well so I assume that'd be mpeg4 or divx? It could do this overnight, or whenever the recording has finished...
This is all very new to me, and i've done some reading, but there's so much info out there and a lot of it isn't up to date any more, and a lot of it is biased, so I'm trying to get a feel for whether what I've suggested above is possible/plausable/easy and some pointers for info, programs etc.
I have found ShowShifter which seems to do the whole record in mjpeg format and then compress to divx later.
Ok, I guess my main questions are:
Do all TV cards give the option of recording as mjpeg files (i'm looking at getting something like the Hauppauge WINTV-HVR 1100 which is £50 on delivered from ebuyer)
Will something like a P3 1.2GHz with 512MB RAM be up to the job?
Would I be better going for a 7200RPM HD over a quieter 5200RPM drive for initial mjpeg recordings?
I'd probably go for 1GB RAM, but not if I don't need to.
any suggestions or comments will be appreciated!
cheers
Danny