Dream video machine or nightmare?

From: Captain Dondo (yan_at_NsOeSiPnAeMr.com)
Date: 05/28/05 

Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 15:15:05 -0700

I have a project where we're trying to capture 4 video signals. For
various reasons, we want to use 1 box if possible. Disk I/O and CPU are
going to be limiting factors.

Based on my experience with video capture, I need to be able to capture
at 640x480 resolution, possibly with no compression if I can get enough
disk space and disk I/O. The total length of video is going to be about
30-60 minutes at a time. The signal is NTSC, 30 fps.

So, I'm trying to put together a machine with the following specs:

4 video capture cards (BT848)
SMP CPU
SCSI or SATA RAID (I need redunancy; two fast drives in a RAID-1 rather
than RAID-0 - I can't afford to lose this data) I might consider
RAID-10....

Could anyone with some more video grabbing experience suggest some
hardware? CPU, mobo, SCSI/SATA controller, etc? I am partial to AMD,
but don't mind shelling out the $$ for Intel if it's worth it.

Also, has anyone done this? Is this feasible? I want to use mencoder
to capture the raw data, then post-process it to compress for storage
and distribution.

Thanks....

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