New software uses PS3 for H.264 encoding

[Seraphic-]

http://codecsys.fixstars.com/en/personal/

Interesting stuff to say the least.
Does not work with PS3 Slim as OS Install was removed.

Fast and Broadcast Quality H.264 Software Encoder for PS3

* Create high quality, yet highly compressed files
* Ultrafast full HD encoding using the PS3 as an external accelerator
* Innovative CodecSys encoding engine used in the Enterprise model
* Flexible software based design

The CodecSys Personal series is a near real-time, broadcast quality H.264 encoder which uses the Sony PLAYSTATION® 3 as an external processing engine. The CodecSys series products, jointly developed with Broadcast International, provide an innovative approach to software based H.264 encoding. The CodecSys Personal takes advantage of the readily available, inexpensive Sony PS3 for its processing engine, making it the most accessible, near real-time product in the HD encoding realm.

Connected to a PC via a Gigabit Ethernet cable, the PS3 performs as an external, dedicated encoder. All of the encoding is handled by the PS3, thus shifting the CPU-intensive processing away from your personal workstation.

[Adub]

I really gotta wonder about quality though. They have some sample video's from Elephants Dream I'm currently downloading one to inspect it. I doubt I will be impressed.

X264 FO LIFE!

[Blue_MiSfit]

Limited to 15mbps??? LOL! Also, it only does 1 pass encoding..

Their samples of Elephant's Dream are at 7mbps and 15mbps for 1080p.

For reference, Elephant's Dream is quite transparent at either of these bitrates with x264 - so I'm interested to see the results..

~MiSfit

[Seraphic-]

So what's the verdict?

PS3 has a beefy CPU (a.k.a Cell) running at 3.2Ghz with six synergistic processing elements.
So if this software takes full control them all, it should make a powerful dedicated encoder.

The PS3 uses the Cell microprocessor, which is made up of one 3.2GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is a spare to improve production yields. PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 has 256MB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed. As of firmware update 2.01, 32MB of the XDR memory is reserved by the PS3's XrossMediaBar user interface, more XDR memory is required for multiple XMB operations to functions at one time .

[nm]

So what's the verdict?

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146451

[rasta21]

...0 day news ;)

http://geohotps3.blogspot.com/2010/01/hello-hypervisor-im-geohot.html