Why high core requirements?

[Josh]

Hello everyone,

I am planning to setup a Linux MCE system very soon and now try to figure out witch hardware I need for the core.
I am thinking of a headless core with only running Linux MCE.

I've allready been trough the "hardware" wiki pages and several other topics and noticed that the advised Core requirements are pretty high.
Therefore my question is: why?

For instance, when I want to watch a movie on a media director the core functions as a network harddrive so the MD does all the work of playing the media.

When I would like to watch a movie and have a tv card with hardware encoding the core doesn't have to do a lot too.

Then why do I need all this extra processing power? I understand that the DCE router is running on the core, and that all the commands sent by orbiters and other devices are routed through the core. Does that requires so much processing power that I need a dual core processor?

Thanks in advance,

Josh
 
 

[totallymaxed]

Hello everyone,

I am planning to setup a Linux MCE system very soon and now try to figure out witch hardware I need for the core.
I am thinking of a headless core with only running Linux MCE.

I've allready been trough the "hardware" wiki pages and several other topics and noticed that the advised Core requirements are pretty high.
Therefore my question is: why?

For instance, when I want to watch a movie on a media director the core functions as a network harddrive so the MD does all the work of playing the media.

When I would like to watch a movie and have a tv card with hardware encoding the core doesn't have to do a lot too.

Then why do I need all this extra processing power? I understand that the DCE router is running on the core, and that all the commands sent by orbiters and other devices are routed through the core. Does that requires so much processing power that I need a dual core processor?

Thanks in advance,

Josh
 
 

Yes in a word... take it from me that unless you have very light usage (or expected usage) you should take the typical Core specs as a good guide.

Andrew

[gunsmoke]

Hi Josh

You need the prosessing power due to that the core is setting up a "image drive" for each MD that you connect to the core. This is refered to as a "diskless install" for the MD's.  So the more MD's you connect, the core needs better specs... to give countinuesly feed for all MD's.

And also if you are thinking of useing HD content video feed, you need the power due to the lack of HD hardware acceleration.

There is a way to install LMCE localy on MD's HDD, look in the wiki pages for that...

Terje