ATI Delivers GPU-Accelerated Video Transcoding

[Gamingphreek]

Then apparently Purevideo has a flaw or problem as well. It didn't come close to a perfect score, do you consider that a problem?

Umm, yeah; why wouldn't I?

Hows DVD IQ or video playback on your own rigs?

They are good. The PVR (PVR 150) looks excellent. Mine actually looks a little "staticy" (5900XT).

Whats your software and encoders you currently use, and a personal comment on its quality?

I use the Nvidia Decoder, the PowerDVD Decoder, AC3 Decoder, and i use the hardware accelerated PVR-150 Encoder.

Nvidia Decoder is very nice, PQ is clear, and provides many options for adjustment. (Real quick about Audio, doesn't provide for any analog surround)
PowerDVD is OK, but not very advanced. PQ is so-so, with slight distortions/artifacts. (I only use it for the 5.1 surround)
AC3: Video is horribly slow, the Quality is not much better, but i haven't had time to mess around with it too much.
The Happauge is pretty damn clear with less artifacts than any of the others, pretty clear image. For some reason bogs the HTPC down (i think that is a user problem on my part)

So you really have no personal experience with Purevideo or AVIVO either right?

Well i have seen Purevideo, my friends has a 6 series card, but like the others it is broken, so my amount of tinkering was limited at best. As for AVIVO, i highly doubt anyone in this forum has had experience with AVIVO save for the editors.

Yes, i do transcoding. Commonly from MPEG-2/4 to WMV dont do too much else in transcoding especially since (aside from the 2.6 P4) none of my systems are suitable to encod in h.264.

Now have i convinced you that i know what im talking about? Are you done treating me like a little kid?

-Kevin

 

[rbV5]

Now have i convinced you that i know what im talking about? Are you done treating me like a little kid?

You bring it on yourself with comments like

ATI should concentrate more on IQ where Nvidia and the rest simply destroy them.

Destroy them? please.....thats nonesense, and just who are the rest?. You have to spend the rest of the thread defending yourself with your "I'm not a fanboy" line and complaining about being treated like a child, even bringing up some crap about "shimmering"...thats all you Kevin, and all offtopic. Maybe stick to discussion rather than cheerleading?

I don't think you do particularly know what you're talking about either, for instance AC3 decoder is an "audio" filter, not video, and Purevideo DVD deinterlacing and MPEG decoding is not broken on 6800 cards.

The Happauge is pretty damn clear with less artifacts than any of the others, pretty clear image. For some reason bogs the HTPC down (i think that is a user problem on my part)

The hauppage "encoder" is encoding the file, however your mpeg DVD decoder is actually "decoding" the file(I thought you said it was "staticy") It may be a user setting bogging it down as its reliant on your graphic cards drivers and MPEG2 decoder for playback. MPEG2 shouldn't be two demanding for analog captures.

You do sound like you have a basic familiarity like the vast majority of PC users, just be aware that there is also a fair number of enthusiasts, even on this board, that perhaps may have a more advanced understanding because its a personal passion just like gaming or overclocking.

As for AVIVO, i highly doubt anyone in this forum has had experience with AVIVO save for the editors.

I'd say you were wrong then. It might suprise you to know that there are AVIVO products in the market like Theater 550 cards and X1000 cards, as well as Anandtech members that work in the industry, making and QA testing most of the products that we all talk about before they ever hit the market. People with signed NDA's frequent and post in the forums at AT, even a number of hardware reviewers are members here as well.

Yes, i do transcoding. Commonly from MPEG-2/4 to WMV dont do too much else in transcoding especially since (aside from the 2.6 P4) none of my systems are suitable to encod in h.264

Then even you would have to admit that the early beta shows some promise, and nothing short of amazing if it holds true. I've also done my share of MPEG to WMV encoding, and its not exactly a trivial pursuit, especially when you are talking WMV9 and higher resolutions and WME choking on MPEG2 and AC3 audio streams and transport stream input.

 

[gsellis]

I am just hoping that the Pinnacle division of Avid jumps all over this. They just annouced Liquid 7 yesterday and added WMV (and HD), MPEG-4, and DivX V5 with no more demuxing edits in the timeline. The Liquid engine is still the only one that relies on the GPU for handling renders for its use. And, they explictly mentioned ATI ("SD output of HD timelines with RT downcovert on Avid Liquid Pro breakout box - requires latest graphics driver (ATI catalyst 5/10)").

Just noticed... they bumped the 1080i requirement (Avid did, not ATI) to PCI-e. Hmmm.

I can say from experience that some of the GPU effects on a 9600XT render faster than the similar CPU effects (Xeon 3.06-533).

 

[gsellis]

DP as it was going south yesterday.

 

[Gamingphreek]

You bring it on yourself with comments like

Im just tired of you acting like i know nothing.

or instance AC3 decoder is an "audio" filter, not video,

Yeah im not really quite sure how that slipped in there 😛 ...

You do sound like you have a basic familiarity like the vast majority of PC users, just be aware that there is also a fair number of enthusiasts, even on this board, that perhaps may have a more advanced understanding because its a personal passion just like gaming or overclocking.

Ill be the first to admit that while i know what i am talking about, and i can hold a discussion, i am no where near advanced in encoding and decoding. My PVR was actually the first time i have been studying and using it. So yeah, no doubt, i dont claim to know more than very many people here at all.

I'd say you were wrong then. It might suprise you to know that there are AVIVO products in the market like Theater 550 cards and X1000 cards, as well as Anandtech members that work in the industry, making and QA testing most of the products that we all talk about before they ever hit the market. People with signed NDA's frequent and post in the forums at AT, even a number of hardware reviewers are members here as well.

None of which can tell about it. I am well aware of the member base here...

Then even you would have to admit that the early beta shows some promise, and nothing short of amazing if it holds true. I've also done my share of MPEG to WMV encoding, and its not exactly a trivial pursuit, especially when you are talking WMV9 and higher resolutions and WME choking on MPEG2 and AC3 audio streams and transport stream input.

Hey, never said they didn't. I was very impressed with the initial performance benchmarks.

-Kevin

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Is this the kind of thing that will speed up DVDshrink? Or is this format to other format only?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
Is this the kind of thing that will speed up DVDshrink? Or is this format to other format only?

Forgive my ignorance but doesn't DVD shrink just remove foreign languages, etc? If so, then no, it wouldn't affect it in anyway.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: xtknight

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
Is this the kind of thing that will speed up DVDshrink? Or is this format to other format only?

Forgive my ignorance but doesn't DVD shrink just remove foreign languages, etc? If so, then no, it wouldn't affect it in anyway.

IIRC it can reduce the bitrate of the MPEG2 stream too in order to reduce size... At least, that's what I've gathered from what I've read in the past...

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

DVD shrink's primary job is to re-encode DVD-9 movies so they'll fit on a DVD-R or +R. Essentially MPEG2 to MPEG2 re-encoding.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
DVD shrink's primary job is to re-encode DVD-9 movies so they'll fit on a DVD-R or +R. Essentially MPEG2 to MPEG2 re-encoding.

If there is support for MPEG-2 encoding acceleration then yes. The old MPEG-2 is first decoded to the lowest common denominator just like everything going in to the encoder. However the application will have to select the right codec to make the acceleration click.

 

[Trevelyan]

So, um for us noobs.... basically this uses the GPU instead of the CPU to speed up video encoding, like say, editing video in Adobe After Effects? is that right?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Trevelyan
So, um for us noobs.... basically this uses the GPU instead of the CPU to speed up video encoding, like say, editing video in Adobe After Effects? is that right?

It accelerates encoding/transcoding, yes - but this particular article was just showing ATI's Avivo transcode app itself. Actual support for the technology in third-party editing programs will be separate I imagine, but will hopefully come along not too long after ATI releases all of this stuff.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

actually, I think it's more for re-encoding wmv into mpeg-2 to burn to a dvd, for example. could be wrong though.

Does anyone know if DVD shrink actually uses this? I was under the impression DVD shrink was a fairly standard app.

 

[Matt2]

EDIT: Crap, wrong thread, I dont know how I did that...

uhhh... anyways...

Sorry I dont encode or transcode, I just play my games... KIll'em ALL!

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Trevelyan
So, um for us noobs.... basically this uses the GPU instead of the CPU to speed up video encoding, like say, editing video in Adobe After Effects? is that right?

It will only accelerate the encoding/transcoding process, the actual editing process will be the same, when you encode the finished product is when you will see the speed increase. The only problem is, it needs software support to be able to do so, likely a patch or plugin for after effects.

 

[rbV5]

ATI has a transcoder application now if you've used MMC's library application. You pick a file from the file library and pick the codec and profile and transcode it. It would be nice if this were standalone like it looks in the article, so you wouldn't have to have MMC installed if you didn't want to.

It would definately be nice to have third party support. Transcoding would be great for files you already have, but even better would be to accelerate encoding from your video app in the first place.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: rbV5
ATI has a transcoder application now if you've used MMC's library application. You pick a file from the file library and pick the codec and profile and transcode it. It would be nice if this were standalone like it looks in the article, so you wouldn't have to have MMC installed if you didn't want to.

It would definately be nice to have third party support. Transcoding would be great for files you already have, but even better would be to accelerate encoding from your video app in the first place.

exactly, if they had 3rd party support for premiere and after effects id pick up an SLI motherboard and a cheap ATi card for encoding 🙂

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: rbV5
ATI has a transcoder application now if you've used MMC's library application. You pick a file from the file library and pick the codec and profile and transcode it. It would be nice if this were standalone like it looks in the article, so you wouldn't have to have MMC installed if you didn't want to.

It would definately be nice to have third party support. Transcoding would be great for files you already have, but even better would be to accelerate encoding from your video app in the first place.

exactly, if they had 3rd party support for premiere and after effects id pick up an SLI motherboard and a cheap ATi card for encoding 🙂

I wonder if a cheap card will do it though? It appears that for "decoding" compressed formats like H264 that there will be different levels of performance based on the gpu. Comment in interviews alluding to X1800 1080p for sure, X1600 720p at least...X1300...we're assessing....if that holds true for transcoding, the X1300 cards may not offer enough of an advantage, we'll have to see.

The idea of using an SLI (or Crossfire) board is very interesting though, opens up some real possibilities, and maybe you don't have to marry into a particular vendors feature set for "everything". I gotta wonder about driver support, I do know that Catalyst and Forceware get along OK at the chipset level, I don't know about the graphics card level though.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Trevelyan
So, um for us noobs.... basically this uses the GPU instead of the CPU to speed up video encoding, like say, editing video in Adobe After Effects? is that right?

Adobe probably would not benefit. They use their own encoders that use the CPU. I heard that After Effects may start using the GPU, but not sure if it is true.

And DVDShrink recodes, that is to say, takes the MPEG2 and "converts" it to a new MPEG2. If the AVIVO is extensibly, then it could, but I say it requires a new version.

 

[M0RPH]

Well, DVDshrink-type transcoding (MPEG2->MPEG2) is already very fast so it wouldn't benefit so much from this. What I'd like to see is support for this to make it into programs like VirtualDub for Xvid/Divx encoding, and Windows Media Encoder for WMV encoding. I think it will be even more crucial in the future when h.264 and HD content becomes more commonplace. I've never encoded a video at HD resolution but I imagine it would be very demanding and that GPU-acceleration would really be a huge help with this.

 

[rbV5]

Programs like Premiere and after effects as well as DVDshrink could potentially benefit greatly because they all use the CPU to transcode. If access to the GPU were available through a plugin, even DVDshrink could be perhaps 1/5 the time to transcode a DVD over what it is now.

 

[Duvie]

Looks good...I want one of these in my next x2 3800+ box for my plasma TV....

 

[xtknight]

AFAIK, there is nothing special about going from MPEG-2 and then going to MPEG-2 again. You are just decoding it then sticking it back in another MPEG-2 encoder. This will certainly work with AVIVO if the interface is implemented.

Oh, and by the way, many of these programs use either one of two things to do conversion:

ffmpeg (includes mencoder)
DirectShow
Video for Windows

They might add it to ffmpeg, so all you'd really have to do is get the latest version, unless there's some special option the program needs to enable for GPU acceleration.

Same thing for DirectShow. As long as the right codec is selected and its options set, the program will have to do next to no work at all to include it. You don't have to update DirectShow (probably not, unless there's some new DXVA interface you need (if even applicable)), you just need to get the accelerated codec.

There are some that still use VfW (for the better or the worse). I expect nothing else but xvid and x264 to be accelerated there, and even that's a maybe.

 

[rbV5]

AFAIK, there is nothing special about going from MPEG-2 and then going to MPEG-2 again. You are just decoding it then sticking it back in another MPEG-2 encoder. This will certainly work with AVIVO if the interface is implemented.

I think the article did mention it

the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds.

for the 4 min 50 second clip from "The Rock"

Same thing for DirectShow. As long as the right codec is selected and its options set, the program will have to do next to no work at all to include it.

I wouldn't call it trivial, directshow filters are no picnic to program and I recall "VFW" is dead from interviews with ATI. I suspect developers will have to work closely with ATI to licence the tech for their software.

 

[xtknight]

Well the DS filter may not be easy to program for ATI or 3rd parties, but I don't have much sympathy for those big greedy companies. 😛 That's the burden they placed on themselves. They promised us video acceleration. And if they don't have a DS filter for it, it's going to piss a lot of people off I'm afraid. I guess a CLI program wouldn't be the end of the world, but if there's a whole new API we have to go through, screw it...

What I gathered is they are working closely with Microsoft (which probably has something to do with modifying DirectShow for support or getting advice). That's why I strongly think there will be a DS filter for it.

What I'm saying is it's easy for programs to select that correct codec and use it. Right now it may select 'Elecard MPEG-2 encoder' (or insert name of MPEG-2 encoder here). All it has to do is change that string to "ATI MPEG-2 encoder". The data formats going out and in each filter should be the same. Ideally it would take about 30 minutes at best to modify your program to work with it, that's the beauty of DirectShow. And worst, maybe a day or two if you have to change your whole graph to be oriented around ATI-esque filters. That's a good thing because if it took weeks to implement, a lot of programs wouldn't bother. Just a simple code change should make them happy. I really doubt they will have to use a whole new ATI API to do everything. Even then if so, someone will come out with a DirectShow filter do it, naturally. They'd be stupid to screw over all devs like that.