Hardware for 1080p streaming from Amahi

[bubby]

Hello all

I am about to build my first Amahi media server. It's main purpose in life will be to stream 1080p media & music to my other pc's around the house. Only 1 stream would ever be active at a time.

My question is, could I get away with a Atom N230 1.6Ghz CPU (and a motherboard supporting a gigabit LAN connection) running Amahi to do this easily? No raid would be involved, so no overhead there. It would just be the streaming over the LAN and whatever system overhead there is.

Thanks in advance!

[cpg]

hi, streaming is dominated by IO throughput, not CPU.

so, it depends on the hard drive you put in there and the io chipset of the motherboard.

the net should not be an issue i stream two HD streams simultaneously to the mythtv backend in my hda, witha 100mb, not-optimized, network.

it also depends on the format of the video. in my case mpeg2.

if you have, say, h.264 content and the decoding is done in the CPU in your hda, then yes, you will need a decent cpu. any atom these days can do it, provided the proper accelerations are compiled into the code. if the decoding is done in the receiving end, then your hda cpu does not matter as much.

hopefully that helps?

[bubby]

Thanks for the very helpful reply.

To answer some of your queries, it would be almost exclusively h.264 content and all the decoding would be done by the pc's at the other end. My Amahi server would literally just be streaming the data off a 1.5TB Samsung F2 Ecogreen drive.

As for the IO quality of the motherboard, I was thinking of going for one based around the nVidia Ion chipset or the Intel G45.

However, I am open to suggestions on a decent motherboard as I have never purchased a mini-itx board before.

Thanks!