Re: in News apple $50 hardware chip

[grumpy]

If you read the news section today here (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070308_001806.html), there is a rumor that apple will add hardware h.264 encoding and decoding, and I'm just curious.

1. Is this enough of a reason for you to by a mac?

2. If anyone has anyone that knows the kind of quality you could expect from the chip they may use?

3.If the quality is good, is there any other company that you've heard of offering , or working on offering, this in an add on board that would be aimed at consumer level pricing.

[dungweaver]

I'm interested in this too. I'm wondering if there's a HAL-type layer, or even just a driver, that invokes this hardware encoder.

Hopefully there's people out there who use current hardware (MPEG-2, even -4) encoders...who can enlighten us.

[JohnnyMalaria]

1. Is this enough of a reason for you to by a mac?


Buy a new computer to get a $50 encoder chip?

Not much point, especially if you already have an XP system. For $79, you can get a USB h.264 encoder that can encode at 5x real-time speed:

http://www.adstech.com/products/RDX-160/intro/RDX-160_intro.asp?pid=RDX-160

Quick Video Conversion for your Video iPod, PSP and Mobile Phone

Import ANY Video File saved on your PC Into Instant Video To-Go ’s Simple Interface*
Hardware Accelerator Encodes Your Video Files Into H.264 (.mp4)
Synchronize Your Movies to Your iPod with Video, Mobile Phone or Portable Media Player

ADS Tech’s Instant Video To-Go, Video Transfer Accelerator Uses Hardware Compression.

Converts up to 5 Times Faster Than Real Time
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[giandrea]

I really dubt that Apple will introduce specific hardware H264 decoding/encoding chips in the next Macs. What they will do in my opinion is to use the video card capabilities for this tasks.

MPEG2 decoding is already available both in Windows and Mac OS X (via Apple DVD Player only). Hardware H264 decoding with Nvidia and ATI cards is already available on Windows. They will add it to the next release of Mac OS X (Leopard) probably.

Then they have probably come up with a method to encode to H264 employing your graphic card. It is possible and discussed on the x264 mailing list, just not implemented in open source.

So my guess is that they will have this new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and QuickTime 8 too.

[akupenguin]

Actually, what we decided on the x264 mailing list was that a current high-end CPU is faster than a high-end GPU for video encoding. None of the chips discussed was anywhere near 50$, though.

[foxyshadis]

Curious, but what about doing reference frame decoding on the GPU? Well, now that I think about it, there's no CABAC and you already have the mocomped reference, so all you'd do is dequantize and add. Hmm. Or what about shoveling data into it and doing CABAC there? Basically, I'm just trying to figure out which parts are the least integrated and thus the most offloadable, but you'd know far better than I would.

[simonhowson]

Buy a new computer to get a $50 encoder chip?

Not much point, especially if you already have an XP system. For $79, you can get a USB h.264 encoder that can encode at 5x real-time speed:

http://www.adstech.com/products/RDX-160/intro/RDX-160_intro.asp?pid=RDX-160
Do you know what the quality is like when using this hardware encoder?

[akupenguin]

A GPU is really bad at doing CABAC, since CABAC is inherently a serial process while a GPU gets most of its speed by having lots of parallel processors.
There's no point in offloading just dequant+iDCT to the GPU, since that takes about 1% of ffh264's cpu-time.
So the only reasonable division of labor in a decoder is: CPU does CABAC, GPU does everything involving pixels and DCT.

[giandrea]

A GPU is really bad at doing CABAC, since CABAC is inherently a serial process while a GPU gets most of its speed by having lots of parallel processors.
There's no point in offloading just dequant+iDCT to the GPU, since that takes about 1% of ffh264's cpu-time.
So the only reasonable division of labor in a decoder is: CPU does CABAC, GPU does everything involving pixels and DCT.

So perhaps they won't use CABAC, whet if they don't use CABAC? Perhaps the compression will suffer but they will get a big speed gain.

[akupenguin]

A decoder can't choose not to use CABAC, that's a property of the input stream. Apple's software encoder already doesn't use CABAC, so it would be no surprise if their hardware encoder doesn't either.