Videorecording

[ArneVR]

Hi,

First of all, sorry. I already posted this in the general section and discovered lateron that I shouldn't have.

I'm looking for a lowcost videorecording system.
I do a lot of audiovisual support of symposia. Normally we record everything on tape (DV-CAM S-VHS Betacam, ...). The recordings are seldom used, so this is quite an unnecessary cost.

I would like to solve this by using low cost unix machines that do the recording on harddisk. Preferably with a command line interface (probably less overhead, so less powerfull machines necessary).

I would like to have MPEG-2, 4 MBit/sec so the recordings can be used for DVD production afterwards.

We often have 4 - 8 videosignals that need to be recorded (serveral rooms)

I see 2 possibilities:
- record locally on harddisk via scsi or firewire harddisk (again less CPU overhead then IDE)
- stream to a big, fast machine that does the recording

My questions:
- has anybody experience doing this kind of thing
- what would be the minimum requirements for the hardware in both cases.
- what would be the possible use of a harddisk rack with direct ethernet access (100 MBit/s)

Thanks for any answer