<div dir="ltr">To answer my own question above...I went ahead and got an MSI Cubi N-010BUS and set it up with Xbuntu and a FE. It does perform significantly better than the RPi3. This is a pretty nice setup for anyone considering building a second FE. The whole setup (box + 2 gb memory + 30 gb SSD) cost $198. It has 5 ghz wifi and plenty of processing power (quad core Celeron N3160) and it is silent.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 7:16 AM, Peter Bennett <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cats22@comcast.net" target="_blank">cats22@comcast.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class=""><br>
<br>
On 07/26/2017 02:06 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Here in New Zealand, we typically get HD recordings of around 5<br>
Gibytes per hour for 1080i H.264. So that factor of 5 is quite wrong.<br>
Part of that is that the HD picture quality transmitted is quite a bit<br>
higher than what is transmitted on MPEG2 systems, but H.264 never<br>
produces files that are 1/5 the size of MPEG2 encoded ones.<br>
</blockquote></span>
That is interesting to note. What we have here from Comcast is 1080i MPEG-2 for some channels and this takes anything from 3 to 8 GB per hour. We have also 720p H264 for other channels and that uses 1.5 to 2 GB per hour.<span class=""><br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
But with H.264, what you have to watch out for is the peak bit rates.<br>
H.264 is very variable as to how much compression it does on each<br>
frame, so when you get a complete change of picture (eg a scene<br>
change), you can get a very high peak bit rate for a short time. That<br>
can be too much for a WiFi connection. MPEG2 recordings can be fixed<br>
bit rate or variable bit rate, but the peak variable bit rates are not<br>
as high as with H.264. Still, they can be too much for an ordinary<br>
WiFi connection. For HD, you really need 802.11ac, not 802.11n.<br>
</blockquote></span>
In my case, all recordings from the same channel are the same size / bitrate. I assume the broadcast multiplex method delivers a fixed bit rate for each multiplex on a frequency. I don't think a broadcast channel can allow higher peak rates. I have noticed that when the action in a scene speeds up, the quality goes down, and I assume this is because they have to maintain a fixed bitrate,<span class=""><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
If you want to play an H.265 file you have downloaded, or a 1080p<br>
H.264 one, then the peak bit rates are again even higher than with<br>
720p or 1080i H.264 recordings. Let alone what is needed for 4K<br>
H.265.<br>
</blockquote></span>
Note that the raspberry Pi cannot play H265 files or 4K resolution of any format.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
Peter</font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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