Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 11:57:47 +1200 From: Craig Harding <crh@outpost.co.nz> To: Rob Schofield <schofiel@xs4all.nl> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Imagination... Message-ID: <m0yzVcr-0028ziC@acme.gen.nz> In-Reply-To: <35B76B85.7BF3@xs4all.nl>
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Rob Schofield wrote:
> What would you recommend for a setup to:
>
> - digitise all my home videos
> - store digitally long term (cheaply, probably compressed)
> - play back to a TV (of course)
> - index all the stored movies?
>
> I would be basing this around a FreeBSD system, but relatively low
> cost/low power if possible (say a recent 2nd hand Pentium 166?), and
> would be prepared to invest in hot peripherals for the digitisation,
> storage and playback. It shouldn't need a keyboard monitor or mouse,
> but should be accessable via Ethernet for control purposes. It also
> needs to be connectable to a HiFi/Sound/Vision centre, probably
> through SCART.
>
> => In other words, the ultimate digital VCR.....
>
> So what would *you* do?
Well, the real issue is the video compression format. Sure, you can
do it with uncompressed video (it makes some things a lot easier),
but you're going to need a very (very) fast server and enormous
amounts of hard drive. Consider it this way, in the broadcast
industry boxes that do this (such as the excellent Pluto video server
based on freebsd which I recently got to see in person - nice
deskstop display) are priced around $US20k and up (emphasis on the
up).
So let's get realistic. What you really want is MPEG1 or 2 video. I'm
not all that hot on MPEG1, but at least it's affordable. There's now
a range of MPEG2 playback devices, so all you need are device drivers
for FreeBSD and you'd be in business. The problem is input. You need
a hardware based MPEG2 compression card, and last time I looked (8
months ago) they were hideously expensive. Like, NZ$15k (about
US$7.5k). They may have come down a bit, and you can probably get
them a bit cheaper in the US than I can here, but that's still big
bucks we're talking about.
Long term I expect MPEG2 encoders to drop dramatically to the $1k-$2k
mark, this is a typical pattern for I/O cards in the video market. If
you can get an MPEG2 video stream, you can have very decent video
quality for 1MB/s of bandwidth, at that's trivial for nearly any
modern Pentium PC.
BTW, if you can do this cheaply and reliably, then forget the VCR
angle (from a consumer perspective), you have a video server that
would be in demand globally. I've wanted to do the same thing, but
lack (a) the funds and (b) the nous to develop appropriate device
drivers.
-- C.
--
Craig Harding Head of Postproduction, Outpost Digital Media Ltd
"I don't know about God, I just think we're handmade" - Polly
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