The VideoLAN Forums

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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