Log in

View Full Version : This is real fast encoding H264


russo121
3rd November 2005, 01:27
From extemetech.com
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1880749,00.asp

"...Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That's all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.

How fast does ATI's new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that's "give or take a second," because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That's all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the "WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)" profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds...."

"...Still, this is worth getting excited about. A 5x performance advantage over the CPU isn't the kind of thing that will be leapfrogged by dual-core CPUs and multithreaded encoders, or by any CPU released for some time. Every manufacturer of video transcoding software should be absolutely beating down a path to ATI's door right about now, figuring out how it can add that "GPU acceleration" checkbox to its application as quickly as possible..."

The real question here is - Is it possible to use all the features of h.264 High Profile with this transcoding program? Anyway, that's a good and interesting start. ;)

McoreD
3rd November 2005, 04:33
Thanks for the news. It would be great to use this Hardware Acceleration system wide i.e. not restricting it to Avivo and make it available to other 3rd party software e.g. Nero Recode, DivX Convertor, Windows Media Encoder etc... Like you used, it will take some time.

CruNcher
3rd November 2005, 05:10
@russo121 and others

For sure they work closely with alot of ISVs to make it right, im confident that it will work out the way we expect it to, most of the times ATI holds up the expactations it sets up :)
Unfortunately as you can see from the Screenshot H.264 (even Main Profile) isn't ready yet, it will be for sure end of the year when the first HD-DVD Player arrive @ the market for 1000 bucks :P. For us Enthusiasts it's then a question of buying such a HD-DVD player or building one yourselves based on X86 and one of the new Generation Graphic Cards, might it be ATI or NVIDIA :D

Manao
3rd November 2005, 07:01
No QPel, no bframes, and, most of all, nothing about the quality. I'm afraid that if speed is really impressive, quality won't be, at all.

Richard Berg
3rd November 2005, 07:04
Cool tech, but I wish they (and nVidia) would work more on getting their decoders out the door.

bond
3rd November 2005, 08:23
this was already discussed here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=102196) :search:

and as i posted there already imho

unless they make the specs publically available and free and good codecs like x264 and xvid support it, i dont really care about using it together with some ati written, propably crap quality, codecfor decoding its indeed more interesting tough, even with an proprieatary ati decoder

QuadraQ
4th November 2005, 06:29
It's not really an open technology yet, but I do hope that the video card manufacturers are taking note that not everyone is a gamer. Personally I'd never spend $300 for the latest 3D accelerator card, but I'd drop that in a second if it could cut my encode times in half at the same quality level.