It’s taken me a while to figure out what I want, but I think I’ve finally narrowed it down.
Lori and I have laptops and I reckon things are going to stay like that for the forseeable future. This means that we don’t need any expensive (I define expense in terms of initial layout, power consumption and noise) powerhouses as the lappys do all the heavy lifting. What I want is
- ADSL
- VoIP (only one line)
- Media server
- Wireless
The question is how do I get this all, particularly when my audio collection is in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and mp3? Let me break down the problem slightly.
ADSL – This is easy. I’ve an ADSL modem which dosn’t consume too much power.
VoIP – This is not easy. Can I run a VoIP app on my Media server and simply use a SIP hardware phone such as this one? I simply don’t know and won’t know until after some testing.
Media server – This is definatly not easy as I don’t know how much computing power is required to make a PVR/DVD player/MPEG player combo. Especially when I’d like the option to upgrade it to a High Definition system in the future. I want to get one of the USB Digital Video receivers and hook that up to a box. But I want it to be low power consumption. I’d like to play XviD and Ogg Theora videos, but I can settle for transcoding everything to MPEG2 if that’s all the hardware playback will handle.
Wireless – This is reasonably easy. I’ve a PCI 802.11b/g card or I could buy one of the 9W Linksys products. The cool thing about the linksys is that I could turn it into a DAAP server (iTunes server) and buy one of the things that allows wireless receiving of DAAP to a hi-fi system. Unfortunatly those systems only support AAC and MP3, not FLAC and Vorbis.
For the media server I think I could just store everything in MPEG2 and get a hardware playback card. Thus the box wouldn’t need processing power, but would need I/O bandwidth. Thus it could have a cheap, low power CPU like a VIA Nemiah or even an ARM based core.
I’ve to consider my use cases aswell. I’ll never want to watch TV and listen to music at the same time. I will want to record TV and listen to music. I may also want to watch TV and make a VoIP call at the same time.
Does anyone know how much processing power/RAM I require for VoIP? Likewise for PVR/playback functionality?
I don’t have a definitive answer, however, I can tell you that my 1.7GHz 512MB machine at home has no problem playing my divx backups (recorded using the latest ffmpeg formats, so probably CPU-intensive).
However, my 350MHz 196MB machine really struggled with them, before I threw it out and got a new one.
So, the answer is probably somewhere between those two..
Thanks Kae. We’ve now got a lower and upper bound.
Right, ideally you would have one box. You need some fancy shit with iptables to ensure you still get interactive performance ( for ssh and voip ), while downloads are happening. In particular, you’d need to prioritise the voip traffic. The best solution in terms of traffic shaping would be a *bsd box, but thats an extra box I suppose.
Moving on, Asterisk can handle sip phones apparently, currently in testing in work here, will let you know how it progresses.
Media server – needs damb akk power, until you say that its a pvr. Note that the previous comment is referring only to playing divx. I played divx with no problems on a p3 450, using an optimized build of mplayer.
PVR needs more power, unless you can get something like a wintv pvr-250 or 350 which has hardware encoding. The encoding will be mpeg2, no problem playing theora or xvid though.
Its quite possible that another use case will be recording tv, watching tv, and making a voip call at the same time.
Hey Aidan,
What phil says is good, but I reckon the voip will be a problem. You can set all the QoS you like on your lan & router, but once it leaves your network, nobody is forced to honour the priority on the packets. So you’ve got no guarantee of quality. As for CPU for voip, I’ve skyped on a P3 650. Wouldn’t want to do too much else at the same time though.