nutball video question

[mark tinguely]

>  How fast should be the server to be able
>  to perform this task? For instance, would PII/400MHz/128Mb be enough?

depends on the quality of the output and if this a dedicated machine
with idle cycles. the multicast vic application does not take to
big of a machine Pentium I/100. Realtime MPEG2 takes more power.

> Do
>  different cards (meteor/bktr) consume CPU power differenly, or about the
>  same?

only the original Matrox Meteor is supported, and it cannot run
on modern PCI buses without locking up.

>  What is the video resolution which consumes almost 100Mbps?

If a person runs the video on the headless machine, and diplays
using X running over ssh, you are also sending all the overhead
of X with the video. The original poster, J. Seth Henry, did not
need movie quality and should vic and multicast the video stream
to the display. vic will send compressed video in UDP multicast
packets.

If movie quality video is required, I would suggest MPEG compression
before sending to network, not displaying the raw video over X.

>  Is it possible to record video under FreeBSD? Which card should I buy for
>  that? Is multicasting can be done using combination of available software,
>  or some programming required?

For serious digital recording, I would point you towards hardware
MPEG2 compression. FreeBSD does not have a free driver for hardware
MPEG2 devices.

--Mark Tinguely