NVidia to do real time MPEG 4 encoding on PCI-E?

[Dr. Ffreeze]

Hello All,

I thought I saw that the new NVidia PCI-E cards could do real time MPEG 4 encoding. Did I dream that, was it dropped, or is it in there? I would just love to be able to capture some decent quality video from a USB 2 or FireWire cam, compress it real time and shoot it off to my wife's family 2,000 miles away. It would make it much easier on her.

Any idea?
Dr. Ffreeze

 

[bloodbob]

MPEG4 is a rather big standard they might be able to do a certain feature set at a certain resolutions in real time.

 

[101998]

I thought I read it was mpeg4 encoding acceleration and that it had yet to have driver support therefore inactive at this time.

 

[bloodbob]

I thought I read it was mpeg4 encoding acceleration and that it had yet to have driver support therefore inactive at this time.

Not only drivers but you would probably need a special application to support as far as I know their is no driver accelerated mpeg 4 interferce in windows. Seeing as divx appears that it may be in bed with ATI after the whatever hardware acceleration in its divx playa I don't know if you will be seeing the divx codec hardware accelerated.

 

[DemoCoder]

When people talk about MPEG-4 support, their talking about MPEG-4 Video/H.264, not SAOL, SASL, 3D scenes, BIFS, face animation, voice coding, MPEG-J, and all the other bonanza of stuff in the MPEG-4 spec.

 

[bloodbob]

When people talk about MPEG-4 support, their talking about MPEG-4 Video/H.264, not SAOL, SASL, 3D scenes, BIFS, face animation, voice coding, MPEG-J, and all the other bonanza of stuff in the MPEG-4 spec.

Actually I wasn't talking about that either but their are multiple profiles I doubt it supports all the features.

( I mentioned wavelet encoding before but that wasn't for video thats my bad ).

 

[Graphics_Krazy]

Isn't realtime Mpeg4 encoding already available in ATI's MMC? Its the simple profile I believe.

 

[MfA]

When people talk about MPEG-4 support, their talking about MPEG-4 Video/H.264, not SAOL, SASL, 3D scenes, BIFS, face animation, voice coding, MPEG-J, and all the other bonanza of stuff in the MPEG-4 spec.

Well that is only right, it is not like anyone is actually using it

 

[allnighter]

Wasn't there supposed to be a separate chip on all NV40 boards (high end at least) for real time encoding acceleration or am I off base on this?

 

[Dr. Ffreeze]

All,

Hmm, why does it seem that not many people are excited about possible hardware MPEG 4 encoder? It could help encode DVDs but the bigger thing is that I think it could greatly increase the quality of the video in video phones. I live 1,800 or so miles away from my family and I am sure I am not alone. Even those that live close to your immediate family I would think would have some close relation that lives far away.

Web cams, and the like are not my specialty, but would a hardware encoder greatly help them deliver much better quality over the internet? (this is presuming that the camera sensors are of sufficient quality). Hook up a USB 2 or FireWire cam, crunch the resultant data stream, and see your family. Is anything like this done now other than the very expensive hardware encoders?

Thankx,
Dr. Ffreeze

 

[Cryect]

You mean a decent computer?

Really a decent computer can pretty much do realtime MPEG4 encoding. We aren't talking a need for DVD resolution at 30FPS. Most webcams really can only do 320x240@15FPS with decent quality which easily about any computer at all within past 3 years should be able to do.

 

[Dr. Ffreeze]

Cryect,

Hmmm. I have an old Creative Web Cam 3. It might have been new in 1999 or so? I looked up the specs of the closest thing I coud quickly find and saw this...

Capable of 16.7 million color live video capture up to 30 frames per second at resolutions of 176x144 (QCIF) and 160x120 (QSIF)

Maybe my limiting factor has nothing to do with encoding but my older than dirt web cam. I will look around more I guess.

Thankx,
Dr. Ffreeze

 

[Cryect]

Heh, yeah prolly. Really hardware MPEG4 encoding would be useful for the crazy people who want to record videos with their cellphones. Truthfully I don't want a camera in a cellphone (then again I'm not a good person to judge by I don't even want a cellphone )

I've seen up to 640x480@15fps in a consumer level web camera and it wasn't cheap at like $80 this was a few years back though.

Or a MPEG4 encoding chip would be nice for reencoding HDTV on the fly but it would have to be pretty powerful and the computer already has to work pretty hard on decoding the MPEG2.

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

I have a Philips Toucam Pro webcam (cost around £50) which can do 640x480 30fps (and 320x240 60fps) (this is a later model of the same Philips Toucam Pro 2).

That doesn't help much at improving the video conferencing experience though. The video quality is still very poor.

I tend to blame bad software and lack of network bandwidth because the CPU tends to be running at less than 10% load (ie it could be doing a much better encoding job).

I think the main target for hardware accelerated video encoding on a PC is for video recorder type applications.

Edit: tidied up link to avoid offending Simon.

 

[Simon F]

I have a Philips Toucam Pro webcam....

FruitFrenzy,
Could you shorten your link? It's going right off the page on my browser. For example: This is your link but much much shorter .

That doesn't help much at improving the video conferencing experience though. The video quality is still very poor.

I tend to blame bad software and lack of network bandwidth because the CPU tends to be running at less than 10% load (ie it could be doing a much better encoding job).

This might not be the problem in this situation but video conferencing has a bit of a compression disadvantage relative to, say, DVD/Movie compression. The latter can use both previous and future frames to predict the current image but that's not really feasible in video conferencing because of the additional latency.