Questions about video streaming

[HighCast]

Hello,

I have few performance questions about video streaming and transcoding.

My current server is hardware is Intel Dual-Core E4500 CPU (2.2 GHz) with 2 GB ram and with fast hard drives. The normal quality transcoding goes as it should 'on the fly' even for 2 simultaneous users.
Music streaming is not an issue, the system can easily handle as much music streamers as I have the need for. The operating system I'm currently running is Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit).

1) If some HD (720p) is to be streamed, the real-time transcoding is too slow, and the video stream does stop time after time. Is there any way to pre-transcode the videos, so that server does just have to stream it, not to transcode on the fly? I think that the system uses only 1 core to transcode the movies. Is there a way to set both to work?

2) What is the recommended (wallet friendly) server hardware to have for streaming 2-4 simultaneous HD quality streams?

[SparkyRih]

I ran subsonic on a 1.6GHz P4 (Win 2003 R2) before, it did pretty well (no 720, but what do you expect from that config XD)

Now I run the configuration in my sig below on an E6300 on 2.8 GHz (I'm planning to OC to 3.2), system memory is 4GB DDR2 (667MHz), but I gave the VM a max of 512MB, subsonic is configured to use 200MB of that (instead of the default 120)... and I have to say it does pretty well... even when streaming multiple 1080i/p vids... Sometimes (not alwaya) it stops randomly for a sec, but I guess I can solve that with the OC...

I also ran subsonic on my Core i7 860... that machine just killed it, got the CPU around 50% with 8 1080p streams XD (To bad I need that power for other purposes...

[GJ51]

I use AVS Video converter to convert all my video into mp4 for internal streaming and flv for mobile streaming. JW Player can play both formats without the need for transcoding. Uncheck the mp4 transcoding to play mp4 video in native format directly to JW Player. Using this strategy I've npt been able to overload the CPU no matter how many simultaneous streams I've tried.

Subsonic video demo is available on my public site listed below in the Videos section.