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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 15/02/2008, <b class="gmail_sendername">Nicolas Will</b> <<a href="mailto:nico@youplala.net">nico@youplala.net</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 11:10 +0000, Adam Retter wrote:<br>> So for playback and converting to DivX etc I will need to process the<br>
> streams in software, what should I be thinking of in terms of CPU<br>> power for this?<br>><br><br>for playback, not much.<br><br>for converting, well how long do you want to spend converting?<br><br>My guess is that you should buy a dual-core machine, this will allow<br>
your machine to safely do a few things at the same time (playing,<br>converting, recording, etc...), and get the fastest thing you want to<br>pay for in order to future-proof your system (HD comes to mind).<br><br>Nico<br>
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<div>Adam,</div>
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<div>I think the key thing here is ..... * UK * . Here in the UK we don't really have HD yet (apart from limited Sky and Virigin services & then you don't get the raw digital signal). So unless you're downloading it HD playback probably isn't required. SD only is all that's needed.</div>
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<div>Basically for what you're proposing you can get away with a PIII probably 700Mhz plus....</div>
<div>(I run a 933Mhz and many others do also).</div>
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<div>Obviously this won't be capable of playing HD and transcoding to XviD/DivX will take a few hours...</div>
<div>X.263 playback....not sure never tried it.</div>
<div>DivX/XviD playback... easy!</div>
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<div>If you want to play HD then you need something more modern and chunky probably a dual core etc.</div>
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<div>My take is this...... you could buy something capable of HD right now for X quid.</div>
<div> or wait until HD is more commonly available upgrade and pay X/2 quid (+acceleration will probably be better).</div>
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<div>So if I were doing this (and it's my personal opinion) I'd go for a low powered box, either a P3 from ebay or one of the more modern lower powered CPUs. (BTW if you want the green angle... Of the energy used during the lifecycle of a PC roughly 80% is consumed during the manufacturing only 20% during use, so reusing that old PC really is green!)</div>
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<div>Of course if super fast transcoding is required or you really want to play HD right now or play games etc then get yourself some dual core action...</div>
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<div>Cheers</div>
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<div>Steve<br> </div>