by GJ51 » Thu Apr 26, 2012 8:10 am
The upload speed is only half the equation. CPU power is also a major factor. You can lower playback speed to as low as 200kbps which will be fine for adsl if your CPU can do the transcoding fast enough. You have to monitor CPU load while the video is playing to see if it's maxing out the CPU.
If you've got enough power everything will run fine, if not you have to use lower res video that your hardware can handle. My experience indicates the the CPU load is proportional to the bitrate difference between the source and the final output.
In your case you probably don't want to exceed 500kbps playback to give you a bit of room on your 690kbps cap. That should work as long as there isn't anything but Subsonic using the upload bandwidth. So then the question becomes "how much power can the CPU provide ?" I recommend at least a quadcore CPU, but I have a 3.0GHz Server that can handle moderate quality video. Blue ray needs a ton of power, only my Corei7 950 or my Dual quad core Xeon can handle blue ray playback without choking. I have a quad core 2.6GHz AMD box that can handle 1080i wtv files. It takes a bit of experimenting to see what each system can handle to get reasonable results.
Gary J
http://bios-mods.com
http://www.maplegrovepartners.com
http://theaverageguy.tv/category/tagpodcasts/cyberfrontiers/