Spurs Engine Hardware H.264/MPEG-2 PCI-E Card

[poisondeathray]

I would like to find out more information or reviews about this card which is supposed to retail ~$250

My understanding is that it's based on the Cell (same as PS3) but has 1/2 the # of processors which run roughly 1/2 speed

Here is the company website:

http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/overview.asp?lineid=6&pronameid=447

And a couple Japanese (google translated) reviews; but there is a lot lost in translation. Maybe some Japanese fluent folk can help out?

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpc.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fdocs%2F2008%2F1120%2Ftawada157.htm&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=ja&tl=en

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpc.nikkeibp.co.jp%2Farticle%2Fnews%2F20081029%2F1009250%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=ja&tl=en

I'm interested finding out more about image quality, as some of the other hardware assisted encoders like Badaboom, Avivo didn't end up being that great....

Anyways, there a few more charts, data, screenshots if you click on that link

http://i36.tinypic.com/15nopyr.jpg


Sony HDV => H.264

http://i35.tinypic.com/ix9lzs.jpg

Thoughts?

[lucassp]

Maybe someone could write some patches for x264 so it can use this extra processing power :)

[Dark Shikari]

Maybe someone could write some patches for x264 so it can use this extra processing power :)Considering that x264 already well outpowers the Cell on a modern x86 CPU, I'm not exactly sure that "1/2 the cores at 1/2 the power" is going to be very useful...*

*IBM attempted to make an H.264 encoder for the Cell, an extremely fast/stripped-down one, and managed to do 1080p realtime using 2.5 cores. x264, similarly stripped and on 64-bit Linux, can do 1080p realtime on one core of a Penryn 3.2Ghz.

[*.mp4 guy]

It looks like its really really bad at interpolation, it encodes hd h.264 to hd h.264 faster then it can encode hd h.264 to sd mpeg2. That. Makes. No. Sense. It has to be using some very wierd interpolation, or be designed very poorly for something like that too happen. For downsizing an image, it should be a simple 2 or 3 tap linear filter, and I don't know of any that aren't much faster then whatever its doing. Considering that their is a fairly demanding linear interpolator as part of the madatory qpel in h.264, it has to be able to accelerate interpolation to get the performance figures its getting. I can't figure this out.

[Dark Shikari]

It looks like its really really bad at interpolation, it encodes hd h.264 to hd h.264 faster then it can encode hd h.264 to sd mpeg2. That. Makes. No. Sense. It has to be using some very wierd interpolation, or be designed very poorly for something like that too happen. For downsizing an image, it should be a simple 2 or 3 tap linear filter, and I don't know of any that aren't much faster then whatever its doing. Considering that their is a fairly demanding linear interpolator as part of the madatory qpel in h.264, it has to be able to accelerate interpolation to get the performance figures its getting. I can't figure this out.It could just be that they never designed it with fast interpolation for resizing purposes and have some incredibly slow C function that does arbitrary interpolation with a very slow filter. You can easily get to the level of dozens of clocks per pixel with such a thing, and an order of magnitude worse if the function isn't designed well for the Cell.

Maybe the interpolation only runs on the PPU.

[lucassp]

Maybe the interpolation only runs on the PPU.

Than it could also run on an x86 core and the rest on the SPEs. How's the memory access of this thing, compared to CUDA?

[Inventive Software]

Seen the news posts? Seen the quote from it?
The company says it can transcode AVCHD, a common format used in consumer high-def camcorders, to and from MPEG2 at up to 5 times faster than real time.
Why do they not do their research? AVCHD means it's encoded in AVC! You can't go from MPEG-2 if it's in AVC! The incompetence of some people.... :D

And encoding to MPEG-2 isn't exactly a hard task. QuEnc can do it in SD in real-time on my Celeron 800Mhz!

[popper]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1238927#post1238927

...
"17-Jan-2009,One said:Leadtek Japan says they're going to release the SDK for WinFast PxVC1100 around the end of this month. It contains Toshiba libraries except for hand gesture recognition and upconversion.
...