Help with streaming 4 inputs

[limiteddi]

Hello mates.
I have gone through a number of articles and have done a fair amount of research but I am still a bit confused on how this all works.

My goal is to stream 4 inputs unicast in H.264. I want have the 4 channels available through its own URL.

Now few questions.
How much horsepower do I need to have 4 Composite or HDMI(any advantage one over the other) inputs and output as H.264 steam?
Is each channel done on a seperate instance of VLC or is this all done through 1 config file?

I'd love to do more reading if such documentation is available or if someone can provide quick answer would be very much appreciated.
Thank you.

[nobody.loopback]

The CPU you need depends on the output bitrate and resolution. The larger these Values, the more CPU you will need.
What Bitrate and resolution do you plan ?

My home System is able to transcode and stream 2 1080p streams with 2.4Mbit/s (decoded from mkv on harddisk), I have not checked how much more is possible, but I guess 4 will be too much.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... Hz&id=1249, two of these are in the system.
So, a more recent I7 cpu should give about the same or a little better performance.

But you also have to take in account the CPU you need to capture your input. I have no experience with video-capture cards, also you did not tell very much details.

[limiteddi]

I just need SD 480i 16:9
I was thinking 1.5Mbps per channel would suffice for live streaming?
For input cards I was looking at Hauppauge Impact VCB per channel

[nobody.loopback]

with 3 Streams 640x420p 25fps, 1.2Mbit/s AAC audio 192kbit, my real 8 CPUs are at a comfortable 50% load.
I think 4 Streams should not be a problem with a modern I7 CPU.

I dont know anything about the resources you need for capturing the Video. I have no experience with this card. Someone else should help regarding this.

[limiteddi]

Can someone advise what card would be the best to go to achieve this? Also, any advantage of running this in Linux vs Windows?