<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Simon Hobson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:linux@thehobsons.co.uk" target="_blank">linux@thehobsons.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">tortise wrote:<br>
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If the R'Pi does H264 well, how hard would it be to convert content such as mpeg2 et al to H264 on the backends, and serve it all freshly converted up to run on R'Pi frontends? Especially now with the mega Intel CPU processing power now available?<br>
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If you are going to do that, why bother with a low power frontend (that's not powered up most of the time) as you'll be putting in a powerful backend that will need to be on all the time ? My backend can't do real-time transcoding anyway - when doing an H264 transcode for iPad it takes about 5-6 hours per hour of program for UK Freeview (DVB-T) SD recordings. But then it only takes 50W total, and effectively only cost me £140* plus the tuners (£20 or less off eBay) and drives (some of which I already had).<br>
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HP Microserver, £240 with £100 cashback offer that seems to never expire !<br>
<a href="http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421" target="_blank">http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-<u></u>hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-<u></u>microserver-100-cashback-<u></u>658553-421</a><br>
I see they are now £250 but still with £100 cashback. Mine is the earlier N36L version.<br>
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And as pointed out, you can buy an MPEG2 decoder licence for a pittance anyway.<br>
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I believe H264 and MPEG2 will account for the majority of media. But I can see your point where other formats are involved - isn't that (in part) what the HLS facility is about ?<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
</font></span></blockquote><div><br>They also offer a VC-1 decoding license (for half the price of the MPEG-2 one), so WebM and XviD are probably the only major formats it can't handle. Since the Pi has h.264 encoding hardware, it may be possible to have the Pi handle the transcoding itself, depending on what fraction of realtime it can decode SD XviD and WebM on the CPU.<br>
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