Can I capture on a low-power machine but encode on a more powerful machine?

[sofakng]

I have a fairly powerful VMware ESXi virtual server but my USB capture card (Genpix Skywalker-2) doesn't function properly using USB passthrough so it looks like I'm going to need to stick it in another machine.

I really wanted to consolidate machines but it looks like I'm going to need another option.

Can I use a very low-power machine (Intel Atom?) to capture content but then have my ESXi server encode the content? If so, how would this work and can anybody give me any advice?

Thanks!

[tmiranda]

I am assuming that Sage is installed on the Server and you want to use the Atom machine simply as a capture device? If that's true you need to setup the Atom machine as a Network Encoder (which requires another Sage license) which is fairly easy to do.

[GKusnick]

I'm not sure what you mean by encoding the content. Digital TV doesn't require encoding because it's already digital when you receive it. It shouldn't take much CPU horsepower to capture it to disk.

If you're talking about compressing or transcoding recorded TV shows to different formats, then obviously you can use any third-party utility for that, on any machine you like. Or if you want to use Sage's built-in conversion feature then you'd need to set up a second machine either as an independent Sage server or as a network encoder, as Tom suggested.