Is there Hardware for transcoding?

[menglor]

Hey all,

I been scanning through the forums but I cant seem to find a yes/no answer.

Basically, I been running PS3 to run the media content in the house, PS3, Xbox, APTV, Patriot Box Office ... and like the general population my box isnt powerfull enough to transcode everything and keep up.

So, I am faced with the dilemma of shelling out 300-400$ for a decent PC, but it almost seems crazy to have power box to be a file server most of the time.

Ironically, I think I would spend that much on a card that its sole job was to deal with the transcoding.

So, my question is, is there any add in card that would aid in transcoding?

[flhthemi]

Would an NVIDIA video card with CUDA enabled speed up transcoding?

[squadjot]

I bought a Atom D525, it can transcode 720p without problems.. may even transcode 1080p if i did'nt have to keep it under 44mb/s ( im using Sony Bravia as renderer)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128452

[thepanoguy]

I am running PS3 Media Server under WINXPSP3 on an emachines Atom N450 notebook with a Seagate 1TB USB hard drive. I can stream VOB and MPG files through a 100mb LAN using Cat6e cable to a WDTV live without transcoding and no jitter. The CPU and LAN use peak at 30% usually sitting on 10%. Therefore an older computer should not be an issue.

[theserver]

kinda similar question:
so are we actually transcoding anything in need of (inverse)discrete cosine tranforms all over the place?... or are we just ripping off wrapper/envelopes of the same basic mpeg4 encoding?
i would prefer all of the encoded content remain in its natively encoded format until it gets down to my ps3 (or whatever) frontend, where we do the math just once. in such a case, one would hope we wouldn't need heavy lifting on the server... just a repackaging no? i'm not going to pretend to know what must go on in detail, so if this is a stupid question forgive me but i would only see a hefty server necessary if we're asking the server to do the initial encoding (like if we have a tuner we hope to serve up).