[MPlayer-users] encoding is slow, is it normal for my system?

[Diego Zuccato]

Daniel Moreno wrote:

> Let's see... 768x576x25x12/8 (assuming you capture in YV12 or similar)
> gives us... nearly 16 Mbs/second. So... you're not likely to save it
> rightaway to disk unless you have a scsi raid or something.
I can have it, but I'd prefer not to use for this... and it's quite
small (4x4GB disks...).

> So you have to use compression. The first I'd try would be mjpeg (using
> libavcodec) since it's suppoused to be the easier to compute. Anyway
> you'll find it's not as fast as you'd like, probably. (When I used
> nupplevideo I could capture 384x576 or 768x288 on my P2-266 without much
> problems, but I'd say this is nearly the maximum my system would be able
> to do. One of these days I have to start playing arround with mencoder
> for realtime compression)
Well, these are quite good numbers... A PII/266 is quite slow, compared
to now common machines (I can hardly find new PCs with less than a
PIII/1G...). Could a PIII/1G or an Athlon 1.2G be enough ? Someone
tested it ?

[Some figures]
Thanks. But it follows... Basically, higher bitrate should "convert" in
slower CPU...
I think I'll probably do some "distributed computing": acquiring on a
machine, encoding on another (I've handy a PIII/700) and saving on a
third.

> I hope this gives you some basic ideas about capturing so that you can
> experiment by yourself and find the best solution for your system.
My system is really a piece of junk... (well, nearly). It's a P200MMX,
so I'm SURE I need something much better to encode in realtime.
But, since I have to buy a new PC, how powerful must it be ? Or I could
even acquire with a system, dump the stream on a network card, then
encode on another machine... A 1Gbps NIC doesen't cost too much...

BYtE,
 Diego.