<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Tortise <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tortise@paradise.net.nz">tortise@paradise.net.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
From: Nick Rout<br><div class="im">
>I am not sure how it is an inefficient approach.<br>
<br>
</div>Each additional disc is a capital cost. </blockquote><div><br>True, but they are pretty cheap these days. Even at 5GB an hour we're talking less than $0.5 per hour of capacity.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Running each extra disc takes extra power. (Accepted negligible if they spin down) </blockquote><div><br>Obviously if you can record at a lower bitrate then the power use might be relevant but if you're transcoding then you'll be running your CPU at 100% for significant amounts of time. I think the HD power requirements would be lower than that. And the heat removal requirements of that sort of heavy CPU use are likely to be more demanding that for the HDs as well.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">Each<br>
disc needs more case space and system resources, if available, such as a spare interface and extra heat removal capacity...</blockquote><div><br>If the alternative is not buying discs then I'm not sure what the benefit of a spare interface would be...<br>
</div><br>Transcoding is one option, but the power and cooling requirements are likely to be much worse than extra HDs and it's not so good if you often want to watch the shows before they have had time to transcode. I'm sure there have been threads on the main list in the past about distinguishing HD versions of shows. You could do a search for them and then look at getting a DVB-S card.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Steve<br></div><br>