Any luck with EPIA VIA low power motherboards and motion

Question

Hi,

I am currently running motion exclusively on an Athlon 1200 box with 384Mb RAM and all is very good thanks to your superb coding - I don't use the ffmpeg options just the jpeg output and then stream it together with convert 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg output.gif if necessary.

However this is a large and reasonably power-hungry box to leave running 24 x 7 - 110watts (OK I know this isn't much but I want to be Environmental Friendly). I currently use a USB Philips Toucam but would ideally like two cameras, perhaps one wintv capture and the other USB. Do you think one of these low power systems would cope?

i.e. any idea of typical spec per camera. I've searched for a similar question but didn't find it.

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.3
ffmpeg version:
Libraries:	ffmpeg, mysql, postgresql
Server OS:	Fedora 4

-- TWikiGuest - 05 Sep 2005

Answer

The problem is probably more power then CPU speed.

A capture card is the least CPU demanding type of camera device. It actually takes more resources to use a USB camera.

Remember that the most important factors with speed is picture size and framerate.

If you run 2fps and 320x240 you should be OK. If you think about 640x480 this multiplies CPU demand by a factor 4. And 25 fps multiplies by 12.5. So the difference is 50 times!!!

-- KennethLavrsen - 06 Sep 2005