The VideoLAN Forums

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.

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.

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

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.

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