Pentium D CPU and video streaming

[philjayj]

Hi Guys, are Pentium D chips any good for streaming HD content to devices around the house, i.e, Other PCs, xbox 360 and popcorn hours?

Thanks

 

[OrphanBoy]

Will you be transcoding the data to different formats/bit rates etc or just sending the data as is?
I recently changed my work machine from a dual P4 3.6 and that was still very competent at transcoding video, so you should be fine as long as you're not working on 1080p MPEG-4

 

[philjayj]

I dont think there will be any transcoding, the files will just be streamed as is. Lets say I was working on 1080p MPEG-4, what chip would you recommend?

Thanks

 

[OrphanBoy]

Oh wow, if you're just sending data across the network...a single-core Atom mini-ITX board? I used to have a job developing video streaming/transcoding systems for a university and we used (in 2004) 800MHz VIA C7 CPUs (in a mini-itx form factor) and this did the job just perfectly, even when doing several streams at once.

 

[kppanic]

Oh wow, if you're just sending data across the network...a single-core Atom mini-ITX board? I used to have a job developing video streaming/transcoding systems for a university and we used (in 2004) 800MHz VIA C7 CPUs (in a mini-itx form factor) and this did the job just perfectly, even when doing several streams at once.

Yeah, you should be more concerned about network bandwidth saturation if you plan to stream multiple HD content across different channels, and maybe media I/O, i.e. HDD read. CPU wise it should be fine.

 

[philjayj]

Thanks for all the replies. Just one other thing, if I went down the software RAID route using a Pentium D chip, how would the array perform using the pentium D?

Thanks

 

[Corasik]

Software raid5 is pretty bad, especially write speed, raid0 and raid1 work ok, and raidz looks promising, but thats only really an option with linux/unix/solaris.

For raid5 with windows, I'd look at picking up a hardware controller such as a perc5