[MPlayer-users] Re: Which TV card ?

[Tuukka Toivonen]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Oliver Fromme wrote:

> > Which software can be used to record full PAL @ 25fps?
>mencoder, nuvrec, ...  Consult the list archives.

I've used successfully streamer. The advantage is that it supports
Quicktime with either jpeg or uncompressed yv12, which are all supported
very well with Broadcast2000 for post-editing before encoding with
something sensible.

Another advantage, streamer supports SMP systems. I have dual Pentium III
933 MHz and it uses 2*60% of CPU time for saving with jpeg (full PAL
quality @ 25 fps, of course). But at least on Debian you must 1) obtain the
latest version (version 3.72 included in Debian doesn't do correctly A/V
sync) and 2) compile it against MMX library manually, Debian binary doesn't
do MMX...

>You can record in uncompressed YUV format which is very
>good quality.  Requires 15 MBytes/sec.  That way, you can
>store about 3 hours on a 160 GB disk.

Aren't you overestimating slightly? I remember getting something like 15.9
MB/s, and that's only for audio+video (container format makes some overhead
too). For 160 GB disk at 16 MB/s, it's only 2 hours 39 minutes. And if
editing and saving edited movie, you'd better have twice the space for that
(too bad mencoder can't read directly broadcast2000 *.htal files but one
must first "render" the movie).

Also, for uncompressed video, hard disk speed can be a bottleneck. I have
an SCSI disk for which hdparm reports 50 MB/s which is much more than 16
MB/s, but don't trust that. With reiserfs it nevertheless was not fast
enough for recording video. Works fine with ext2, so don't use journaling.

Also, look for transfer speed tests at
http://www.storagereview.com/
and you'll notice that the beginning of a HD is much faster than the end
(almost twice faster!). And hdparm (I guess) tests only the beginning...
(anybody know good HD benchmark for Linux?)

I'm personally planning to buy 2*120 GB disk and configure it as RAID-0. It
will be faster and cheaper than the equivalent space as a single disk [*].

[*] Why the heck hard disks with multiple platters don't use RAID
internally?