xvid hardware encoder cards

[musicnyman]

i know there are a couple of divx encoder cards out there, but does anyone know of any xvid hardware based encoder cards? the only one i could find was from japan. and the plextor ones i heard only convert via capture, not converting one file to another.

thanks,

http://www.iodata.jp/prod/multimedia/tv/2003/gv-xvdpci/

[easyfab]

This is not XVID but XVD
And it's mpeg2 not mpeg4
XVD is like vcd or svcd

[musicnyman]

ooops, missed that one...sorry.

so any out there know of any?

[celtic_druid]

There was a post here (I think) by someone interested in making some kind of USB2 addon that would take a percentage of the CPU load when encoding XviD. Think that is about as close as you are going to get.

[SeeMoreDigital]

If you want to encode Mpeg4 in hardware, you could give the Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U (http://www.plextor.be/products/video_products/px-m402u.asp?choice=ConvertX%20PX-M402U) a try!


Cheers

[WaryWolf]

i think the newest nvidia cards support video en/decoding, but i haven't given it much of a try with my 6800. apparently the newest 65.76 drivers support this, but i installed them without taking any measurements first. anyway, a 3000 kbps xvid encode (720x576) at 25 fps decodes fine with ffdshow, all postprocessing on, and taskmanager says cpu usage is only 50% on my 1.8 p4. xvid encoding seems faster, although i can't trust my perception... ;-)

[musicnyman]

thanks guys.

SeeMoreDigital, i've read reviews that plextor can only create mpeg4 from capture, not say dvd (or any source) -> mpeg4. if you already have a file on your computer that you want to convert to mpeg4, it bypasses the plextor, no?

i think i'm wanting too much too soon. i want something that does what my mpeg2 encoder card does. takes most of the cpu away from my computer and does all the conversion (or most) in hardware instead of cpu/software, but mpeg4 of course. i takes about 8 hours per dvd (2 pass) right now to convert to mpeg4, so i wanna speed up this process without getting a new computer. i can convert an mpeg2 file using my hardware encoder in a matter of an hour or less, and realtime of course from capture.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hi musicnyman,

I would think the Plextor will be able to "back-up" anything that say, your VCR can.... ie: nothing that contains MacroVision!

One thing to consider about these devices. All of them will only be able to generate 1pass encodes. None of them will be able to generate anything like the quality you can obtain from an 2pass encode!

If you want to stick purely with an hardware solution you could try the Panasonic DMR-E100 (http://www.t3.co.uk/reviews/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=28269&subsectionid=761&subsubsectionid)



Cheers

[musicnyman]

thanks SeeMoreDigital.

i think you're still talking about capture/vcr and not conversion here. i don't want to convert/compress a "captured" stream to mpeg4. i want to speed up the file conversion process like i do using my mpeg2 encoder card on my PC currently. so taking vob files and converting them to mpeg4 on the PC, but speeding up the process including 2 pass. instead of using software/PC cpu to encode video, i want to use hardware to minimize cpu on the machine and make it faster.

is this the thread you're talking about?

Geforce6800

As Nvidia has released his NV40 GPU,a new feature has been added.
That is a programble video processor,that can hold 60% of encoding job and 90% of decodeing which should be done by CPU in the old time.

Should Xvid do someting to support this feature?

Then encoding a movie will be much faster.

[SeeMoreDigital]

It think it will be some time before you'll find what you are looking for!

Todays stand-alone player/recorders and external PC devices do not possess the required processing power to speed up the Mpeg4 encoding process with the quality and speed I think you are after....It all comes down to number crunching in the end.


Cheers

[musicnyman]

thanks, i was afraid of that :)

faster cpu it is then on the pc to speed it up.

[Emp3r0r]

Originally posted by musicnyman
faster cpu it is then on the pc to speed it up. ok yoda :D

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
It think it will be some time before you'll find what you are looking for!lets hope it happens in 2005

[SeeMoreDigital]

Never say never... Check this out: -

http://europe.hercules.com/showpage.php?p=89&b=1&f=1


Cheers

[saratoga]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
Never say never... Check this out: -

http://europe.hercules.com/showpage.php?p=89&b=1&f=1


Cheers

Pretty sure that doesn't do hardware encodeing. It would be very difficult to make a hardware encoder I think. Since only the decoder specification is fixed, your hardware might be obsolete by the time you got it deisgned and fabbed.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by saratoga
Pretty sure that doesn't do hardware encodeing. It would be very difficult to make a hardware encoder I think. Since only the decoder specification is fixed, your hardware might be obsolete by the time you got it deisgned and fabbed. I think you may well be correct.

The Sigma chip-set it uses is the same one that I've got in my Xcard. The only major different appears to be that it has FireWire and analogue video inputs. I'll try and find out a bit more information.

So, it would seem the Panasonic DMR-E100 is about the only true stand-alone device with Mpeg4 encoding and decoding....

I wonder how good it is?


Cheers

[Corn]

The NV6800 card has more than 10x the number crunching power of a PC CPU. It could be used to do the cosine transform and perhaps some stages of motion detection for encoding. That would probably speed things up alot. There are two ways that I am aware of to do this. First one is to use the pixelshader arithmetic pipeline (and the there is a C compiler for this allready http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/lang.html ). Second option is to utilize NVs own general purpose GPU. I have not seen anything suporting this yet or how to program it tho.

Cheers

[musicnyman]

sounds promising, thanks, but the xvid codec would have to support this card and it doesn't right now right?

[lordadmira]

Actually it would be pretty easy to make a high performance encoder chip. These are called ASIC's (application specific integrated circuit) and are made for all kinds of purposes. It would be a piece of cake for some company to throw down a die and give us 100 fps encodes. A normal CPU can really only do one thing at a time. But on an ASIC u can put on as many pipelines as u want almost. The reason they're not there is because there's no market. Think about how many die hard encoders there are in the world, not many. And even more importantly there is no MPEG4 set top box market. A company would have to sell tens of thousands of chips to get the price down to anything reasonable. Once somebody decides there is a demand for the set-top box, we will have these chips.

As far as using the GPU (Radeon, etc) for encoding, this is not really feasible. It doesn't matter how many mips the GPU can do, the AGP bus is geared for mainly one way communication: to the monitor from main memory. The return trip of encoded data would hit a serious bottleneck. Also a standard GPU is made to do 3D transforms and doesn't have things like MMX. So for the GPU to play any role in encoding there would need to be a pretty radical makeover of the video subsystem. And that's something that I can't envision becoming economically feasible.

LA

[Leak]

Originally posted by lordadmira
As far as using the GPU (Radeon, etc) for encoding, this is not really feasible. It doesn't matter how many mips the GPU can do, the AGP bus is geared for mainly one way communication: to the monitor from main memory. The return trip of encoded data would hit a serious bottleneck.

Well, AGP is almost on it's way out according to chipset and mainboard manufacturers because of PCI Express, which removes this bottleneck.

Also a standard GPU is made to do 3D transforms and doesn't have things like MMX.

Still, those "3D Transforms" are vector operations on vectors of size 3 or 4 or matrices of size 3x3 or 4x4, which IIRC is quite what video encoding needs - pixel and vertex shaders are quite powerful and carry a great "abuse potential" for uses besides 3D graphics...

[Corn]

I was about to post the same thing as Leak just did ;)

But since you just did, I´ll just say I totally agree :D

Cheers

[Soulhunter]

Hmm, watch this (http://www.vitecmm.com/product.php?id=2)... :rolleyes:


Bye

[LightningFire]

It would be nice to see the WIS chip in Plextor device (http://www.wischip.com/prod.html) integrated in a PCI-tuner card (with a PCI bus-master chip to connect to). Still it is only MPEG4 SP@L3 with B-frames. Should suffice for recording analog stuff to be played back on a standalone.

Has anyone ever seen a consumer (price) level HW-compression card with support for multi-pass encoding, not retoric, I really am intressted in knowing of such cards ;).

The graphics chips from ATi and Nvidia, do aid encoding. But you can bet on it being only usefull when using their own software and codecs, or a supported MPEG2 codec.
I believe it is limited to their IDCT and MC units that are able to do some operations in reverse. The programmable video engine some manufacturers are touting applies mainly to there video effects, smoothing filters and adaptive deinterlacing. I can't wait to see more about the performance and support of ATi's new Theater 500 Asic however.

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
The Sigma chip-set it uses is the same one that I've got in my Xcard. The only major different appears to be that it has FireWire and analogue video inputs. I'll try and find out a bit more information.

I can also make out a conexant chip on on that card below the EM8475. Presumably a standard ADC like used on TV tuner cards,CX23884 or something like it. Software recording solution, with hardware decoding. I don't really see the use of that. No offense to your X-card, SeeMoreDigital, more like a blind believe in (programmable) cpu power :).

Edit - Woohoo they went for an older solution then the CX23884, their tech specs list the BT878A as the chip used.
Hercules seems to like that oldie, they at least also used it in their PCTV SAT, that I know off.

Greets

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by LightningFire
...Software recording solution, with hardware decoding. I don't really see the use of that. Agreed!

Originally posted by LightningFire
...No offense to your X-card, SeeMoreDigital, more like a blind believe in (programmable) cpu power :) I'm not sure what you mean?

The Sigma Xcard is an Mpeg1/2 and Mpeg4 "hardware" decoder card and is able to produce razor sharp images on your TV screen. Far better than many "so called" high-end DVD stand-alone players!


Cheers

[LightningFire]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
I'm not sure what you mean?

The Sigma Xcard is an Mpeg1/2 and Mpeg4 "hardware" decoder card and is able to produce razor sharp images on your TV screen. Far better than many "so called" high-end DVD stand-alone players!



Hardware decoder cards, are mostly as limited in their decoding capabilities as stand-alones. Seeing they often use chips that are also found in stand alone players. Where I can see there advantages over stand-alones is in the software that will be regularily updated.
About the TV-output of the X-card I can't say anything except for generally a bad image on your computer monitor will look way better on your TV anyway and a component out of a DVD-player will most likely offer digital quality television as it is offered by your X-card (correct me if I am wrong). The TV-out I have seen was on an S3 savagepro and on a ATi radeon 8500, I must say I am very happy to have bought a standalone (SCART connected to TV) cause S3's and ATi's output on the TV was crap, scaling, and colors and resolution where unpleasant and didn't fit the TV. By the way how does your X-card handle deinterlacing (if it does) for progressive output?

Hmm, maybe stepping a little topic sometimes, sorry for that
:o.

Greetings

[SeeMoreDigital]

The Xcard is able to output video via, VGA, composite, s-video, RGB scart and component RGB/YUV.

And interlaced video is output as interlaced. Progressive video is output as progressive... Just like a good quality DVD player would be expected to handle it!


Cheers