Online HD Video Recording

Hey all,

The 4th annual Desert Bus for Hope is coming up in about 15 days.

For those that don't know, Desert Bus for Hope is hosted by the stars of " The Escapist's" Loading-Ready-Run, Unskippable and the Escapist News Network.

These guys usually do fairly random stuff which is often funny.

Long story short, they are playing Desert Bus for 24 hours straight, each, for six days.

Why?

To raise money for the Child's Play Charity, which donates games, books and cash to sick children in hospitals.

What I want to do is to record the full six days (~144 hours) of 720p quality video. My question to you guys is what program would be best to record the crazy antics these guys will pull for 6 days and roughly how much space would be taken up by this recording?

Thanks for your help!

 

File size is simply bitrate times time, so storage depends on the stream rate.

 

You might look into VirtualDub for an application to record it or CamStudio.

As for space, I wouldn't set aside any less than 500GB. My HD video camera records 720p at a bit more than 1GB/hr, and I'm not sure a computer with non-specialized encoding hardware will be able to compress things that much while recording in decent quality.

Really, recording long-running HD video isn't a terribly easy proposition currently, at least not with current software, and it will depend a lot on your hardware.

 

I would be using the "Media Server" in my sig as well as a 500GB external drive on top of the 1.3 or 1.5TB I have free... would that be enough?

 

It depends on the codec you record do. I THINK CamStudio should be able to record it, but I don't know for sure. As for space, you should be ok, especially if you record to H.264.

 

I would assume he'd want to just capture the stream as is. On the fly H.264 encoding is pretty difficult (takes a lot of processing power), and the incoming stream will already be highly compressed. I mean why decode then re-encode the stream?