Yes, the price is awesome, having to buy a new PC and pay more of electric bills not so much.
I tried to measure some things, not sure if my measurements are totally off because of the demo overlay text - that would be stupid...
Vista 32bit, aero disabled, really slow Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200, measured average cpu time percentage for ~1 min by 'perfmon', max value is probably 200%...
substream 352*288 15fps (motion detection, direct record, constant bitrate ~60kB/s)
-minimized 6%
-top 9.5%
main stream 1920*1080 15fps (motion detection, direct record, variable bitrate ~60kB/s)
-minimized 43%
-top 60% for small window, 70% for big one
hidden main stream (direct record, variable bitrate), substream (motion detection)
-minimized 43%
-top 50%
main stream (direct record, variable bitrate)
-minimized 42%
-top 60% for small window, 70% for big one
hidden main stream (direct record, variable bitrate)
-minimized 41%
-top 42%
main stream (no record, variable bitrate)
-minimized 42%
-top 60% for small window
main stream (no record, constant bitrate ~500kB/s)
-minimized 52%
-top 66% for small window
It seems that:
- motion detection on the main stream is cheap
- variable bitrate saves a lot of cpu
- just enabling of the main stream is expensive
- showing substream in the main window would help, especially with many cameras
- I need to test it with a full version