Processor power for H.264 live transcoding

[Kubus33]

Hello all I have been all over the net trying to find a place where I can calculate the processor power for live transcoding of a live H.264 stream. I got as far as a Intel Xeon Quad core with a 12mb cache wil be needed but still not sure about hardware for example the buss speed of the processor is 1333mhz but the highest server I could find with ram buss speed is 667mhz so isnt that a waste? Anyhow here is what im trying to do.

I have a video feed which is SD coming in to a video capture card using Video in (yellow input) and stereo audio (red and white). the video is D1 resolution NTSC 30fps I have this going into a hardware encoding MPEG2 video capture card (could not find MPEG4/AVC h.264 anywhere). So the stream I need to live transcode is a MPEG2 stream and I need to transcode this to H.264 at 1024 bitrate. Can anyone please help with processor required for this and can anyone maybe recomend a good video capture card that will work under linux and a good linux flavor to run all this under. Can 2 streams be transcoded at once from 1 server? if so what processor power will be needed for this? how much ram would be recommended.

Thank You all so much for taking the time to read and respond to my request

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

H264 is very consuming for CPU and RAM. Depending on your resolution, it might be enough for one and two. UNfortunately, you have to test.

[Kubus33]

Thank you for the reply. One thing I have found online is some people saying that VLC does not take advantage of multiple core processors that it only utilizes 1 core is that true? Thanx

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Thank you for the reply. One thing I have found online is some people saying that VLC does not take advantage of multiple core processors that it only utilizes 1 core is that true? Thanx

Not for encoding under linux.

[ikusat]

I'm setting up a similar project with live h264 transcoding, but in the opposite direction: from H.264 -> Mpeg2.

My impression is that H.264 is single threaded for both decoding and encoding, but I may be mistaken, so I have the following questions

1) Would the two systems have similar requirements(do encoding and decoding take roughly the same amount of CPU)?

2) If I wanted to do any H.264 encoding and decoding, a higher speed dual core would be better instead of a quad core right? (This is per the "How to get better performance when playing HD H.264" thread).

[pci]

Hi Kubus33 - to usage of multi core processors
Streaming on Apple PowerMac G5 Quad -not Intel- uses one processor at a time, the three others just idle