ATI Catalyst 6.3 comes with AVIVIO Converter

[Sharktooth]

This release of Catalyst® introduces the following new features:


Overlay Theater Mode Enhancement This release of the Catalyst® introduces an enhancement to the Overlay Theater mode found in the Catalyst® Control Center. This enhancement allows for higher resolution than the current desktop setting to be available for the Overlay Theater mode.
Avivo™ Video Converter This release of Catalyst® introduces the Avivo™ Video Converter. The Avivo™ Video Converter is a transcoder tool that provides a quick and easy way of converting videos from one format to another. The Avivo™ wizard found in the Catalyst® Control Center, allows the user to select the input file, and output format, along with the quality level and file location. The Avivo™ Video Converter accepts a wide variety of file formats as a source, and outputs to file formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA, H.264/AVC and more. Click on How to use the Avivo™ Video Converter, for more information

Let's see if it works on non x1000 series cards and if the h.264 encoder has been improved since the beta... :)

[Romario]

Well, I really hope that Ati improved their H.264 encoder, because that H.264 encoder isn't showed well in testing. And, I hope that Ati will allow using x264 encoder from their Avivo Video Converter application, in the next major release.

[Kostarum Rex Persia]

Yeah, and I expect a lot from new Ati Avivo Converter. Shark, can you tell us first impressions about newest Avivo Converter?

[williedigital]

i dont think you can do h264 in any format other than the ipod video setting. I couldn't find an option at least. So it's only really fair to compare x264 at ipod settings to it. I tried using it this morning, and it wouldn't convern h264 converted with either x264 or recode to ipod video. It did convert a divx clip to ipod video, but it wouldnt play in vlc so i cant say anything about quality.

[Sharktooth]

i still didnt test it... i'll do it asap.

[Kostarum Rex Persia]

Damn Ati, I expected that.

[mod]

Waitin for someone testing on < X1000 series :)

[williedigital]

i'm using x1300. trying another file now. xvid inside mp4 container. program seemed to recognize the file and i've begun converting. status bar says 0% though the cpu is pegged at 100%. all in all, pretty dissapointing so far.

[hurts70]

don't know if off topic, what's the difference between standalone version of avivo video converter (xcode) and the builtin version ?

[DeepDVD]

I use a X1600 pro.... same as willie ... no liquid playback, the stuttering is bit(!) better than on my old RADEON 9600 pro ;)

Cyberlink has released a beta of kind-a-frontend to implement avivo into WMP. It doesn't accelerate any HD-trailer.
I hope it's only the beta state which is to blame for that.

[odditory]

There's growing concensus among various forums that the GPU-assisted AVIVO converter thing is vapor and basically just marketing junk (for now at least).

Given that the encoder can be used (when patched to circumvent card detection) on even a cheap NVIDIA or ATI card, not to mention an ATI x1900, they get the same encoding speed (and crappy looking results) since this is a cpu-based encoder it seems (for the moment). It seems ATI has pre-released this quick and sloppy software-only AVIVO converter junk as a placeholder for what hopefully will be a hardware accelerated version at some point in the future.

With NVIDIA already supporting GPU-assisted H.264 acceleration in the latest driver, and their own hardware-assisted encoding on the way, ATI better get with it.

[Tassadar]

Hello guys!

Take a look here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/avivo_1.html

[foxyshadis]

The fact that it rocks WME's world on speed with similar quality (according to the reviewers) is actually really cool, for people who do wmv and suffer its laggard speed. If they set up a pseudo-smp between the gpu and card later they could superspeed movie encoding.

Anyway, the question is, can you use it with nvidia, since it's cpu-only?

[travisbell]

Hello guys!

Take a look here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/avivo_1.html

Sums it up fairly nicely I would say.