TV Card: Encoding - Sempron Sufficient?

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ZionIFL

I'm on a budget - but basically after a Sempron machine (the Socket 764
version) that would allow me to record TV shows using a TV card, and encode
them to MPEG-2 so that I can burn the shows to DVD.

Sure a P4 system would do the trick, but taking cost-price into
consideration - a Sempron would appear to me to do the trick - or will it?

Specificially, a Sempron 2800+ is what i'm looking at.

Is this CPU sufficient to do the job?
 
ZionIFL said:
I'm on a budget - but basically after a Sempron machine (the Socket 764
version) that would allow me to record TV shows using a TV card, and encode
them to MPEG-2 so that I can burn the shows to DVD.

Sure a P4 system would do the trick, but taking cost-price into
consideration - a Sempron would appear to me to do the trick - or will it?

Specificially, a Sempron 2800+ is what i'm looking at.

Is this CPU sufficient to do the job?
Click to expand...

My old PII 350MHz had a TV card in it and I could record. It had the
occasional miss if I did other things at the same time, but we're
talking about 350MHz. Technology has moved on, so even the TV cards
are probably better. You may need to record in a different format, and
encode separately, but I should think a Sempron would do it.
 
ZionIFL said:
I'm on a budget - but basically after a Sempron machine (the Socket 764
version) that would allow me to record TV shows using a TV card, and encode
them to MPEG-2 so that I can burn the shows to DVD.

Sure a P4 system would do the trick, but taking cost-price into
consideration - a Sempron would appear to me to do the trick - or will it?

Specificially, a Sempron 2800+ is what i'm looking at.

Is this CPU sufficient to do the job?
Click to expand...

Sure. Even an Athlon 1800 can do real-time encoding. For re-encoding,
a high end P4 will be faster.

If you want to lessen the burder on your CPU, you can even get a video
capture device with hardware encoding. It does all the work and feeds
pre-encoded material to your CPU. The only downside is you are less
free in your choice of codecs.
 
OK - thanks.

The reason I wondered was because I checked the manufacturers website
concerning encoding into MPEG2 or MPEG4 - and they reckon that you need a
2.2GHz Athlon or at least a P4 1.7GHz.

Pretty rude hey?
 
ZionIFL said:
OK - thanks.

The reason I wondered was because I checked the manufacturers website
concerning encoding into MPEG2 or MPEG4 - and they reckon that you need a
2.2GHz Athlon or at least a P4 1.7GHz.
Click to expand...

It depends on a lot of things, such as what parameters you use for the
encoding. The more resolution, motion detection, compression, filtering and
preprocessing you ask it to do, and the more bandwidth you ask it to do
(such as 2 mbps, etc.) the more processing power it takes.

What assumptions they used when they made their 'reckoning' I don't know.
 
ZionIFL said:
OK - thanks.

The reason I wondered was because I checked the manufacturers website
concerning encoding into MPEG2 or MPEG4 - and they reckon that you need a
2.2GHz Athlon or at least a P4 1.7GHz.

Pretty rude hey?
Click to expand...


Whatever encoding and capture card that is that you looked at -- I
highly reccommend you buy ***something else***. If the processor
requirements are that big for it the card can't be doing very much. A
good capture card will work with an 800Mhz system fine, most of them
state 1Ghz. 2.2Ghz is just off the chart for a capture card to need, it
must not do anything in hardware and offload everything to the processor.

Just curious though, exactly what card is this so I can mark it on my
avoid list?


-Timbertea
 
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