[H-GEN] Home NAS box and video streaming: how to choose a processor?

Greg.Lehmann at csiro.au Greg.Lehmann at csiro.au
Tue Oct 5 19:01:57 EDT 2010


Just a comment on video conversion in general and how it often doesn't work or work well enough. There are so many different encoding programs that use so many different algorithms. They don't all implement things properly either, so what you get from somewhere could be seriously challenged by some default video conversion process you have set up to happen automatically. You may find you don't get this proposed approach of yours to work for everything. If you are a fanatic about image quality you may hate what you get thrown up on the screen. Also consider that as you say what TVs can actually handle can be limited. If you want automatic I'd be tempted to go for a cheap media player like the popcorn hour c200 which can handle just about anything, until the TV's catch up to that sort of level of capability and then you won't need to worry about conversions anyway.

I'd be tempted to do the conversion on a PC and review results. Not automatic, I know, but you end up with better results. Also consider using a GPU if you want truly fast conversions, but again image quality can vary as the GPUs are a bit of a black box as far as the SW provided goes. I have tried the ATI GPUs and the speedup is truly fantastic. I believe the Nvidia GPUs come with more flexible SW. Since you are building your own NAS (I'd call it a server since you are doing stuff on it besides file serving) you could put a GPU in it.

Cheers,

Greg




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