Comments on: Home IT system

By: Murf

Murf — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:35:08 +0000

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.

By: phil

phil — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:05:31 +0000

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.

By: balor

balor — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 15:23:58 +0000

Thanks Kae. We’ve now got a lower and upper bound.

By: Kae Verens

Kae Verens — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 13:05:01 +0000

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..