Question for programmers

[Saiya-Jin]

Hey, first of all I'm not a programmer so I'm sorry if I will sound dumb, and that's why I'm asking in the first place, hehe.

Now for the question:
I've seen one article a while ago saying how a group of people made possible for a graphics card to process normal stuff, in other words programming normal stuff for the video card instead of a normal CPU, I'm not sure if they used emulation or whatever. Well anyway, I was wondering if it was possible to make a video encoding application use the video card for processing ,since it has way more processing capabilities than a regular multi-purpose CPU? That way we wouldn't have to have an extremely expensive CPU for some decent encoding capabilities.

[dani82]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72137&highlight=gpu+encoding

i think the graphic card will be just as expensive as an overpriced cpu

[Saiya-Jin]

Hmm, well that sucks...
Also, about the video encoding capabilities of the GeForce 6 series, how exactly would one go about using it? Is there a specific program or can any video encoding application use it?

[Wilbert]

There are two AviSynth plugins using it (CShader and another one).