Ati's Avivo platform to support hardware h.264 encoding?

[williedigital]

From an anandtech article posted over a month ago... anyone have any new news?

In product terms, the R520, RV530 and RV515 (Radeon X1800, X1600 and X1300 respectively) will all support VPU/GPU assisted transcode to/from any of the following media formats: H.264, VC-1, WMV9, WMV9 PMC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX. For those of you who are not familiar with the term "transcode", it refers to the re-encoding of video into a different bitrate and/or different format (e.g. going from an MPEG-2 DVD to an H.264 avi file).

All Avivo enabled graphics cards will support this GPU assisted transcode; the only requirement will be that the appropriate Catalyst driver is installed. While ATI is currently planning to release the first of their R5xx GPUs by the end of this month, the transcode acceleration will not be ready by that time. ATI has committed to delivering the transcode acceleration by the end of this year, and more specifically, about a month after the release of the R5xx GPUs. We have no word as to how much of a performance boost you'll see with the GPU assisted transcode, although the largest gains will be going from formats like MPEG-2 to something like H.264. (The reason being that H.264 encoding is incredibly slow using CPU-only encoding right now.)

[bond]

the only thing i read about ati and avc recently is that they are working on an avc encoder and this page (http://www.ati.com/technology/h264.html) where they talk about releasing an avc decoder soon

also somehow i doubt that this acceleration will work with every h.264 codec, which i assume is the reason they are working on their own decoder/encoder

[williedigital]

part of me wants to agree with you on it being realtively proprietary, if it wasn't for that line about "all you need is the right driver". How dope would it be to have significantly sped up avc encodes by buying a graphics card. woot.

[flloyd]

Of coure they're going to make it proprietary. (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1880749,00.asp). Companies always do stupid stuff like this, make a great technology but only for their own crappy product so that it doesn't get mass appeal and market penetration, thus in the end it just fades away.

The benchmarks though show some serious potential. Too bad you'll be locked into ATI's surely crappy software.

[LiFe]

nVidia announced a little before ATI announced above, that they are building a standardised platform for any 3rd party to make use of the GPU power. And what nVidia does, ATI has to do. The GPU will become easily accessable through standard APIs for all developers, eventually.... It's just taking to loooong.

[Doom9]

there's been talk about this for a couple GPU generations now... I'll believe it when I see it on my doorstep and when I have open source codecs like x264 and XviD making use of it. Until then, it's marketing hype.

[williedigital]

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3702&page=2

they do want to hook up with nero...

Does it work out of the box and if so, how's that achieved?
I will not BS anyone, our drivers are not yet tuned to match the capabilities of our hardware in terms of video performance and quality. That being said, we will have H.264 (and DVD enhancements) by the end of this year. I know that some customers were burned last year when a vendor claimed to have a VPU only not to deliver. ATI is well renowned for our video capabilities and I can assure our customers that the video & display hardware in the Radeon X1K is the best in the world, and we will roll out the video enhancements (along with faster 3D) throughout the next few Catalyst releases.

Do you need a new interface in DXVA for it to work in all DirectShow apps?
Excellent question, H.264 is so new that there is no standard API for DXVA acceleration yet. So we have worked with our industry partners such as Cyberlink and Intervideo to develop one. We will of course support any API from Microsoft but this is not expected for awhile. Some vendors may be working on custom proprietary applications to run H.264 but this is not ATI’s focus. We view H.264 as another CODEC that we need to enable in various applications by API. Beyond Cyberlink and Intervideo, we see leaders like Sonic and Nero as companies we would like to support closely.

If a DXVA interface doesn't exist, will you only expose it in your own apps, or will there be a non-DXVA interface for all VFW/DirectShow apps to make use of?
As I wrote in the previous question, we will definitely enable other applications, this is the future. ATI is a hardware company, i.e. we make money selling hardware, it is in our best interest and in the interest of all consumers to enable as many third party applications as possible and not limit the H.264 experience to a custom application. Custom applications may serve a short-term need but it is a dead end with XP MCE and Vista. BTW, VFW is deader than dead…..get with the new century.

[bond]

ATI is a hardware company, i.e. we make money selling hardware, it is in our best interest and in the interest of all consumers to enable as many third party applications as possible and not limit the H.264 experience to a custom application. Custom applications may serve a short-term need but it is a dead end with XP MCE and Vista.hey sounds good, hope they keep up with what they claim

BTW, VFW is deader than dead…..get with the new century. ;)

[Kostarum Rex Persia]

Well, Ati has some great idea, but it's shame that their AVC decoder won't be freeware.

I am curious about GPU capabilities. Can, eventually, x264 devs(in the near future) try to use GPU power for extra speed-up the compression procces?