ATI's Avivo Platform - H.264 Decode and Transcode Acceleration on R5xx

[GTaudiophile]

Text

ATI is saying that the first Avivo enabled GPUs should be shipping by the end of this month, meaning that the first R5xx GPUs should be available by then. Once we have hardware in house, we can really put Avivo to the test.

Sadly sounds like Anand still doesn't have R520 in house

 

[Tab]

Doesn't really interest me, I don't think this year is going to make my upgrade.

After watching the new Farcry video I think I'll wait for a while before I decide to upgrade from my X800XL.

 

[Munky]

Sounds good, I just hope I dont have to wait forever for some lame M$ patch to get it working.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Text


Sadly sounds like Anand still doesn't have R520 in house

ATI claims it still hasn?t sent a single R520XT board to any of its partners. The Radeon X1800XT is getting ready and the first batch of the card is produced but not even the big OEMs have these cards.

We spoke with numerous people on Friday and Saturday, and it turns out that the only cards that might be available for some key partners are Radeon X1800XL cards.

that's why Sanders used a PreProduction r520 . . . ati is keeping this one under wraps

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Text


Sadly sounds like Anand still doesn't have R520 in house

ATI claims it still hasn?t sent a single R520XT board to any of its partners. The Radeon X1800XT is getting ready and the first batch of the card is produced but not even the big OEMs have these cards.

We spoke with numerous people on Friday and Saturday, and it turns out that the only cards that might be available for some key partners are Radeon X1800XL cards.

that's why Sanders used a PreProduction r520 . . . ati is keeping this one under wraps

Under wraps? Or are they just embarassed?

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Text


Sadly sounds like Anand still doesn't have R520 in house

ATI claims it still hasn?t sent a single R520XT board to any of its partners. The Radeon X1800XT is getting ready and the first batch of the card is produced but not even the big OEMs have these cards.

We spoke with numerous people on Friday and Saturday, and it turns out that the only cards that might be available for some key partners are Radeon X1800XL cards.

that's why Sanders used a PreProduction r520 . . . ati is keeping this one under wraps

Under wraps? Or are they just embarassed?

i doubt they ati is embarassed - the r520 is at least a competitive card to the 7800gtx. . . but that is just my opinion . . . we'll know for sure in a few days

 

[mooncancook]

I hope the R520 is competitive to the 7800 in both price and performance. This Avivo thing sounds interesting to me since I already have a Theater 550 card. Hope their software and driver doesn't suck like their current TV Wonder software, or maybe hope GBPVR will support the Avivo feature.

 

[gsellis]

Makes me wonder of SS had a second taping...

But back on topic...

I was starting to get wood reading it. Wow, since my NLE already uses DX9 and the GPU, I can see a hugh freaking advantage the R5xx can give my edit with transcode on the fly of HDV. Turbo baby!

 

[crazydingo]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Text


Sadly sounds like Anand still doesn't have R520 in house

ATI claims it still hasn?t sent a single R520XT board to any of its partners. The Radeon X1800XT is getting ready and the first batch of the card is produced but not even the big OEMs have these cards.

We spoke with numerous people on Friday and Saturday, and it turns out that the only cards that might be available for some key partners are Radeon X1800XL cards.

that's why Sanders used a PreProduction r520 . . . ati is keeping this one under wraps

Under wraps? Or are they just embarassed?

Under wraps for most people, embarrassed for you.

 

[akugami]

So far, while the Geforce 7800GTX is nice performance wise, I haven't seen anything to really make me WANT to buy it. There isn't a significant enough jump from my X800 to make me give up 500 beans. The Geforce 7800 seems to be similar to Intel P4's. More, bigger, faster as the motto so to speak.

While the performance numbers won't be known for another two weeks or so, at least ATI seems to be trying to further the technologies in their graphics cards. With performance numbers what they are, I'd need a significant boost in power to upgrade from my X800 or I'd need features that are very compelling. As I do author DVD's and do video encoding, the AVIVO features seem compelling at this point. Certainly more promising than nVidia's vague promise of H.264 support in the drivers at some future date for the 7800.


The above is basically a repost of what I posted in the news threads on the front page. If performance of ATI's video cards (in non Crossfire mode) is higher than the 7800GTX (non SLI) I'd have to seriously consider buying it. If it's merely competitive (kinda like the X800 and the 6800's) then I'd have to skip this generation even though I'm highly interested in H.264 encoding and decoding. I don't need H.264 encoding yet, it's more in the way of future projects. The H.264 decoding would be nice to have even now though.

 

[SynthDude2001]

After being pretty disappointed with the whole Purevideo/"PVP" crap from last year, I'm firmly of an "I'll believe it when I see it" mentality towards this. It certainly would be nice to have hardware-assisted encoding (especially now that HD content is much more common) - but then again, Nvidia said we would be able to do that with the 6-series...

That said, if this turns out to actually be something (and it's competitive in 3D performance with the GF 7-series), then I'll definitely look at buying an R520 whenever I decide to dump my 6800GT (which probably won't be until next year).

 

[rbV5]

We already know that the MPEG2 hardware encoding works very good. This is the kind of feature I've been looking for for some time now, so I hope ATI doesn't let us down with some poor implementation.

What will be interesting is software support. If it also means that Theater 550 will be supported in MMC, and will use the library applet to transcode from. If thats the case, hopefully you will be able to import into the library, and MMC gets a better EPG than Guide+. Perhaps transcoding from within MCE?

I know I coud use some serious help transcoding to H264, cmon ATI step up

 

[stelleg151]

Im waiting for a single PCI or PCIe card that has HDTV, SDTV, and Analog before worry too much about this new feature. Nevertheless I am definately glad ATI is adding this to their next gen cards.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Im waiting for a single PCI or PCIe card that has HDTV, SDTV, and Analog before worry too much about this new feature. Nevertheless I am definately glad ATI is adding this to their next gen cards.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you want - there are already PCI tuner cards that do both HDTV and regular analog NTSC TV...

 

[stelleg151]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Im waiting for a single PCI or PCIe card that has HDTV, SDTV, and Analog before worry too much about this new feature. Nevertheless I am definately glad ATI is adding this to their next gen cards.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you want - there are already PCI tuner cards that do both HDTV and regular analog NTSC TV...

But they dont do Standard digital.

Edit: at least that is what I have heard time and time again.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Im waiting for a single PCI or PCIe card that has HDTV, SDTV, and Analog before worry too much about this new feature. Nevertheless I am definately glad ATI is adding this to their next gen cards.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you want - there are already PCI tuner cards that do both HDTV and regular analog NTSC TV...

But they dont do Standard digital.

Edit: at least that is what I have heard time and time again.

Well, you could be referring to a few different things by "standard digital". If by that you mean lower resolution (480i/480p) digital non-HD broadcasts, then all the HDTV tuners will be capable of receiving those. Could you be more specific..?

 

[stelleg151]

I'm pretty new at HTPC computing, have been doing research for the last couple of weeks, and almost everyone has told me that if you get an HDTV tuner card, you also need to get an SD tuner card, like a Hauppauge 150, or something along those lines.

If what you say is true, then I may get one now, but I have a couple of questions:

Would the GPU asisted encoding and decoding work with non-ati tuners, like the Fusion5?
Is there any practical use today for H.264 encoding, or is it just a thing that will be important to have in the future?

Thanks for the help Synth

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151
I'm pretty new at HTPC computing, have been doing research for the last couple of weeks, and almost everyone has told me that if you get an HDTV tuner card, you also need to get an SD tuner card, like a Hauppauge 150, or something along those lines.

If what you say is true, then I may get one now, but I have a couple of questions:

Would the GPU asisted encoding and decoding work with non-ati tuners, like the Fusion5?
Is there any practical use today for H.264 encoding, or is it just a thing that will be important to have in the future?

Thanks for the help Synth

aha...the Hauppage 150 is just a regular NTSC analog tuner card, which could be why they're referring to it as SD. Most (if not all) of the popular HDTV tuners will receive analog broadcasts too (varying in quality), but the main thing that the Hauppage and other similar cards have (that the HDTV tuners don't, as far as I'm aware) is a hardware MPEG encoder for recording analog. That's not needed for digital tuners since all recording requires is saving an exact copy of the received transport stream.

As far as GPU-assisted encoding/decoding working with other tuners - I really don't know. Decoding should be no problem, since any modern card today can handle MPEG2 decoding at 720p/1080i (which is the format used for HDTV broadcasts). As far as encoding...that's more tricky. Like I said, HDTV recording is pretty basic; it's just saving the digital transport stream (which is sort of a wrapper for MPEG2 and a few other things). If you wanted to record in real-time to another format...that would definitely require software support from ATI (or Nvidia), and I don't know how likely or unlikely that is. If you wanted to record the transport stream and transcode it into a different format later, it's my understanding (from this article on AT) that the video card should be able to help you with that (in some separate program, I imagine).

H.264 encoding isn't too relevant today, except that it's the highest-compression HD format - it has the smallest files for the same quality (as far as I'm aware). It'll become more important in the future, since that's the format to be used for both competing HD DVD formats (like if you wanted to author your own HD DVD of some sort). Of course, if you wanted to encode smaller HDTV-quality files now, it would be nice to have too.

I think I covered everything you asked...let me know if you have any more questions and I'll try to answer.

 

[stelleg151]

Awesome, that really clears things up for me, especially the Hauppauge stuff.

Is there software MPEG encoder for Analog tv? I dont really care about recording analog tv, althought it would be kind of nice to have in case I have to miss a show.

As for the MPEG2 decoding, basically to record the digital signal there is no real decoding necessary? That would be nice, because then later I assume you could convert to H.264 if you needed to free up space.

Thanks a lot Synth, everything is starting to make sense now.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Awesome, that really clears things up for me, especially the Hauppauge stuff.

Is there software MPEG encoder for Analog tv? I dont really care about recording analog tv, althought it would be kind of nice to have in case I have to miss a show.

As for the MPEG2 decoding, basically to record the digital signal there is no real decoding necessary? That would be nice, because then later I assume you could convert to H.264 if you needed to free up space.

Thanks a lot Synth, everything is starting to make sense now.

Yeah, there are ways to record/encode MPEG2 in software for analog broadcasts (though I haven't really tried myself since I don't care much for analog TV anymore ). I'm not entirely sure what kind of performance you'll get out of them, but I imagine it shouldn't be too bad these days.

And yes, that's correct - to display the digital/HDTV signal, decoding MPEG2 is necessary, but to record it, no decoding is necessary...it just consists of saving a digital transport stream to the hard drive (at a rate of about 6-8GB/hour, in general), which you can later view or transcode or edit or whatever.

 

[stelleg151]

Sweet.

One last question: Are there generally HD channels that come through basic cable? I understand that HD comes through on channels like 4.1, 7.1, etc. But I cant tell if that comes through on the basic cable coming into our house. All I can say for sure is that there are analog signals, because my roomate has a crappy little TV that gets channels, but I assume that it wouldnt be able to access HD channels if they were there.

Sorry for my complete ignorance when it comes to cable and TV stuff, I have never really worked with it before.

Thanks again.

Edit: Also, there is no cable box, just the coaxial cable that comes from outside.
Edit#2: Also, I know that it comes over the air, but I have heard that the signal is pretty bad in Canada. (im in vancouver), and I would rather not have to get an antenna.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Sweet.

One last question: Are there generally HD channels that come through basic cable? I understand that HD comes through on channels like 4.1, 7.1, etc. But I cant tell if that comes through on the basic cable coming into our house. All I can say for sure is that there are analog signals, because my roomate has a crappy little TV that gets channels, but I assume that it wouldnt be able to access HD channels if they were there.

Sorry for my complete ignorance when it comes to cable and TV stuff, I have never really worked with it before.

Thanks again.

It really depends on the cable provider, but most big cable providers (in big cities and some smaller ones) send the local HD channels (NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, ABC, etc.) unencrypted over cable, so you can indeed receive them if you have basic cable if that's the case. For that you'd need a tuner that can do QAM (which is the modulation for HDTV over cable). Current PC HDTV tuners can only receive unencrypted QAM, which is generally limited to the locals unless they forgot to encrypt one of their "premium"/non-free channels. Encrypted QAM isn't possible on the PC for now (that would require a CableCard tuner or something like that), so no ESPN-HD, TNT-HD, HBO-HD, etc.

Another thing to keep in mind (though it doesn't matter too much) is that those channel numbers you're seeing (4.1 or 4-1) are almost always "virtual" channel numbers - the signal is usually sent on another physical channel, but the transport stream contains information that usually lets the tuner/TV re-map the number to correspond with the analog channel (usually). For example, on my cable here in the dorms, I get PBS and CBS in HD on physical channel 65 (65-1 and 65-2), but my tuner maps them to virtual channel numbers 12-1 and 3-1.



Just saw your edits:

Edit: Also, there is no cable box, just the coaxial cable that comes from outside.
Edit#2: Also, I know that it comes over the air, but I have heard that the signal is pretty bad in Canada. (im in vancouver), and I would rather not have to get an antenna.

As for #1, that's no problem, the cable box would only be needed to unencrypt the encrypted channels, and the locals are most often sent "in the clear" or unencrypted. A standard coaxial cable line will be fine if that's the case.

OTA is another option too as you said, but I'm personally a fan for using QAM if it's available to you. Generally more reliable than antenna broadcasts if you're not close to the broadcast towers.

 

[stelleg151]

Ok, Im looking at the Fusion5, and Im pretty sure I heard it can do unencrypted QAM. Most cable companies have their own encryption too dont they? So basically you would need a provider-specific tuner to get the encrypted channels like HBO-HD.

I gotta go to bed, class is early tomorrow, but thanks so much for your help synth, it wont be forgotten when im the most powerful man in the world.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: stelleg151
Ok, Im looking at the Fusion5, and Im pretty sure I heard it can do unencrypted QAM. Most cable companies have their own encryption too dont they? So basically you would need a provider-specific tuner to get the encrypted channels like HBO-HD.

I gotta go to bed, class is early tomorrow, but thanks so much for your help synth, it wont be forgotten when im the most powerful man in the world.

Yes, the Fusion 5 (either Lite or Gold) is a good inexpensive tuner that can do unencrypted QAM. As far as provider-specific encryption...I really don't know for sure how that works. But at the least, you'd need a cable box (or CableCard) to decrypt it, specific to your account (if I understand what I've read correctly).

Feel free to PM me if you have any more questions (we've probably hijacked this thread ), I'm glad to help where I can.