ATI GPU transcoding app?

Dave Baumann said:
Later found out? It was indicated as such at launch:
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/reviews/25/

That is enlightening for sure. But the guys who wrote this article for example, surely could use some information much early in time (published like 10 weeks earlier) to avoid being look that stupid. Right?

Secret Video Encoding Tool „ATI Avivo Xcode“ revealed
27. November 2005
Encoding movies five times faster

Von By Arnt Kugler
Avivo XCode: Top-secret power tool for ATI’s Radeon X1000 GPUs

CHIP Online had the opportunity to test a beta version of ATI’s still secret „Avivo XCode“ encoding tool. It uses the power of the GPU to reduce video encoding time –into virtually any format – drastically. Our results show: The new ATI solution easily does it 5 times faster than even the fastest CPUs available today!
...
 
That is enlightening for sure. But the guys who wrote this article for example, surely could use some information much early in time (published like 10 weeks earlier) to avoid being look that stupid. Right?
I can't vouch for what was communicated to others at the time, nor can I tell what questions they had or assumptions made, although that particular link with the wording "Beta" and "still secret" could suggest some things. Rys also had likewise communication for his article in December (I think I may even remember the breifing together actually!).

The third piece of what's about to become available is the Avivo Video Convertor application, which uses the conversion engine in ATI's own Multimedia Centre, codename Cobra, to accelerate the transcode of video (anything that can be fed in via a DirectShow filter) in a standalone application. The Video Converter application is entirely CPU-bound at the moment, not using any of the graphics hardware, X1K or otherwise, to transcode. Early versions were unlocked and ran on any CPU with any GPU present, however the version ATI will present shortly is locked to systems with a Radeon X1000-series graphics board installed, due to the hardware-specific stuff they'll add in the future.

I'm not sure there should be much surprise registered here. Even if some articles thought this to be GPU assisted, other articles prior to the release of the of the actual software had already pointed out the use case.
 
Beside that Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 is there any other software that can hardware accelerate MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 via the 4800 series ?

I just want an encoder type software like SUPER or something similar. Also speed is one thing, how is the quality of the encode ? Any review on that ?
 
I think PowerDirector 7 that can do this is not out yet. It will need to be patched for GPU transcoding.

How is the AVIVO Xcoder ? Will that be updated to PowerDirector 7 style GPU transcoding ? I don't want to get PowerDirector 7 if Xcoder can do the job. Any ATI guys want to give detail on that ?
 
True, also know what the configuration of the 4800 cards would be nice. However this is PR spin so we'll never get the true picture from those particular tests.

EDIT: from the link posted earlier....

Geez, getting a standard def movie around 200MB (or even 400MB) with decent qualit is hard enough. I guess were not talking HDTV playback type quality here. :???:

The slide in first post is not referring to that quote, it says four full length movies to 200MB+ files takes around 30 mins, while the slide is about transcoding 1 hour of 1080p video, and since it's taking 32min it's safe to assume this would be 1080p in the end aswell.
 
looks like I get to bump this up. It looks like they are releasing a trancoder on December 10th. Exciting indeed!

Users can then download and install the free ATI Avivo Video Converter. In tests performed using this utility, AMD was able to convert an hour of video to a portable player format in about 12 minutes.(1) Combined with one of the recent ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card offerings, the ATI Avivo Video Converter helps deliver video conversion at up to twice the speed of competing solutions, at just over half of the suggested retail price.(2)

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/AMD-Set-Release-Free-Software/story.aspx?guid={CC10E4FE-57E0-4024-9546-1C7CBE3E463D}
 
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Running Badaboom on every CUDA enabled videocard: priceless.
 
There's more detail on this from Charlie at the Inq. It's more that just a video transcoder, it's about making stream computing ubiquitous at the consumer level by folding the functionality into the mainstream graphics driver. It opens up the market for stream and stream-apps, and hurts Nvidia where they try to make CUDA a highend professional product.

AMD is doing something brilliant here, with the release of Catalyst 8.12 in early December, AMD is going to roll the CAL into the mainstream consumer driver. When you get the graphics drivers, you get GPGPU functionality for free, no download, no install... it just works.
In the end, AMD/ATI is not being quiet any more. It has the fastest cards on the market, it has a much cheaper professional card, and now it has the APIs. In a few weeks, it will have the CAL everywhere, and what the competition charges an arm and a leg for, it gives out for free.
 
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AMD is doing something brilliant here, with the release of Catalyst 8.12 in early December, AMD is going to roll the CAL into the mainstream consumer driver. When you get the graphics drivers, you get GPGPU functionality for free, no download, no install... it just works.
Ehm... what?

This is BS. Example: The F@H GPU2-Client comes with CAL DLLs and you get GPGPU functionality for free, no download, no install... SiSoft Sandra comes with CAL DLLs, too.

So, what's the point? Yes, it's easier for consumers and developers. And there is "one" CAL DLL (ok, there are two DLLs) for all GPGPU programms. That's all.

A good example of this is the video encoder. Nvidia has been hyping up Badaboom, a custom built app for video encoding. It works great as long as you need to go from one very specific format to another specific format, and quality is not a real concern. ATI's AVIVO encoder is rolled into the 8.12 driver pack, and it is free. Badaboom is $30. And it is slower

The new AVIVO transcoder runs only on HD4000 series. The next question is: With Badaboom I can convert an 1080 video (eg MPEG2) to 1080 video (h.264), can the AVIVO converter this, too?
 
The new AVIVO transcoder runs only on HD4000 series. The next question is: With Badaboom I can convert an 1080 video (eg MPEG2) to 1080 video (h.264), can the AVIVO converter this, too?

From the very slide you posted, yes. 1080P input and output are features of the new AVIVO transcoder.
 
So, what's the point? Yes, it's easier for consumers and developers. And there is "one" CAL DLL (ok, there are two DLLs) for all GPGPU programms. That's all.

I think that's the point. It's soon to be part of the standard domestic graphics driver install. Your stream-apps use it transparently, it's not some high-end GPGPU thing that needs user input or professional level hardware. The fact that it's easier for consumers and developers, that any developer knows that it will "just work" for every ATI card without any messing about should give devs the confidence to add stream support to their apps.

IIRC, people like the Quickpar and Virtualdub developers are already looking at support, so all of a sudden stream becomes much more viable for smaller and more mainstream apps that will benefit from the extra processing power. It's no longer just for the £3000 image processing suites.
 
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There's more detail on this from Charlie at the Inq. It's more that just a video transcoder, it's about making stream computing ubiquitous at the consumer level by folding the functionality into the mainstream graphics driver. It opens up the market for stream and stream-apps, and hurts Nvidia where they try to make CUDA a highend professional product.

Where is nVidia making Cuda high-end professional product?
They've had support for all GeForce 8 and higher products for a while now, in the standard driver (since the 178 release).
ATi doesn't have ANYTHING yet, and their first release will be only for the 4000-series. nVidia supports cards that have been on the market for over 2 years.
 
Where is nVidia making Cuda high-end professional product?
They've had support for all GeForce 8 and higher products for a while now, in the standard driver (since the 178 release).
ATi doesn't have ANYTHING yet, and their first release will be only for the 4000-series. nVidia supports cards that have been on the market for over 2 years.

This misconception is arising perhaps because CUDA products were badaboom(which wasn't free btw), and quadro CX was played up. Truth is new adobe software utilizes openGL and not CUDA as such. So normal geforce products should be accelerated as well(low memory could be a problem though).

As ATI is releasing transcoder for free, it is perhaps creating the impression that nVidia is targeting high end market.
 
Ehm... what?

This is BS. Example: The F@H GPU2-Client comes with CAL DLLs and you get GPGPU functionality for free, no download, no install... SiSoft Sandra comes with CAL DLLs, too.

So, what's the point? Yes, it's easier for consumers and developers. And there is "one" CAL DLL (ok, there are two DLLs) for all GPGPU programms. That's all.
The main point here is qualification. With CAL being bundled in the driver CAL is going through our qualification process, this then enables the app to use the CAL in the driver and then automatically benefit from improvements that we may make from release to release.

Note, Rage3D has an interview which touches on some of the points being discussed here: http://www.rage3d.com/articles/stream/index.php?p=3
 
This misconception is arising perhaps because CUDA products were badaboom(which wasn't free btw), and quadro CX was played up. Truth is new adobe software utilizes openGL and not CUDA as such. So normal geforce products should be accelerated as well(low memory could be a problem though).
Somewhat correct. The wrinkle is that Adobe Premiere has a plug-in mechanism. There is a "CUDA" Transcoding plug-in here for GPU accelerated Transcoding, provided by Elemental, but instead of this being Badaboom the plug-in is RapiHD, which is listed as being Quadro only.
 
This misconception is arising perhaps because CUDA products were badaboom(which wasn't free btw), and quadro CX was played up. Truth is new adobe software utilizes openGL and not CUDA as such. So normal geforce products should be accelerated as well(low memory could be a problem though).

As ATI is releasing transcoder for free, it is perhaps creating the impression that nVidia is targeting high end market.

But Cuda and Stream are both APIs/extensions to the driver.
We're not talking about applications that may or may not be using them. That is up to developers (except that they didn't really have a choice, because ATi didn't have a proper SDK yet).
Thing is that nVidia has had Cuda as a standard feature of the driver for all 8-series and higher for a while (yes, going through qualification and everything), so I don't see how what ATi is going to do next month is different from what nVidia is already doing, let alone how that has anything to do with 'high end'?

As ATI is releasing transcoder for free, it is perhaps creating the impression that nVidia is targeting high end market.

Well that's pretty far-fetched, seeing as nVidia didn't even develop Badaboom in the first place. It's just one of those applications that taps into the potential of the GPU unlocked by Cuda.
Badaboom is a product of Elemental Technologies, Inc.
A commercial software company, which obviously is not going to give its products away for free.
So well, trying to predict the future of Cuda by a single product from a company independent of nVidia... that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Cuda is a standard feature on all GeForce 8 and newer GPUs, and the SDK can freely be used by any developer. So neither the hardware nor the software has to be expensive.
 
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Do they plan on supporting their other unified architectures? Because the install base is pretty small right now. CUDA has a huge install base now. Like over 100M now and its also being taught at college universities. ATI has an uphill battle getting this to take off. Unless of course this is just a stop gap solution till OpenCL and DX11 arrive.


But Cuda and Stream are both APIs/extensions to the driver.

Isnt Nvidia's Cuda's C compiler the model baseline for openCL?
 
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