HD Encoding/Transcoding with HD 4800

[lopri]

I know that AMD and NV both touted HD transcoding capability of their new GPUs, but I have been skeptical on its practicality. Not because I don't believe that it's possible, but because I think software will not be ready anytime soon.

Then I ran into this today.

ATI Avivo Xcode Pack for HD 4800

I don't have a HD 4800 series card (yet) so I can't see if this thing is real. I don't know if this is a plug-in app incorporated into Catalyst Control Panel, or if it works in conjunction with a 3rd party standalone application. No clue at all.

It's uploaded @Guru3D today, so it's got to be something new. If anyone's interested, try out and please report back. If it works as described, then it's a hell of a deal (free).

 

[Andrew1990]

I think that video transcoding is available even with the HD2400/HD2600s. It uses a specific program I forgot the name off.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Only for Vista? Boooo!

 

[ViRGE]

Seems fishy since we already know that AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated under normal circumstances.

 

[ofacto]

The Avivo transcoding software has been available since the x1000 series. Its a pluin for CCC. When it was first released it didn't actually use the GPU, but it was still really fast at transcoding video. I used it with HD 2600 pro and it took 5 mins to convert a 45 min tv show. The quality was not that great, but still good for quick and dirty conversion. The only downside was that there weren't many file options and no batch convert option.

I am not sure if they actually use the GPU in later versions, but for the past few release every ATI card (from the x1000 series up) used the same version of the software.

EDIT: I just installed that 4800 series Xcode pack, its the same old AVIVO software

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Seems fishy since we already know that AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated under normal circumstances.

What do you mean?

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: lopri

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Seems fishy since we already know that AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated under normal circumstances.

What do you mean?

I mean today, right now, AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated, in spite of the fact that AMD initially said it was when it was released. AMD has been wholly incapable of delivering hardware encoding acceleration for 4 years now, I don't expect that to change overnight.

 

[geoffry]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: lopri

Originally posted by: ViRGE
Seems fishy since we already know that AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated under normal circumstances.

What do you mean?

I mean today, right now, AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated, in spite of the fact that AMD initially said it was when it was released. AMD has been wholly incapable of delivering hardware encoding acceleration for 4 years now, I don't expect that to change overnight.

By that logic MSFT was unable to release Vista for 5 yrs but then they released it "overnight".

Things take time, and with NVDA pushing CUDA and GPGPU I would think that AMD wouldn't want to be left too far behind. The next ADBE software will utilize NVDA and AMD GPUs and F@H came out for AMD way before NVDA.

 

[LTG]

There was also an article at Tom's that said they saw a demo of Cyberlink GPU accelerated encoding on the 4800 series.

However I won't believe it until someone here posts because as someone mentioned ATI directly lied about hardware supported transcoding before.

Even the software encoder was not impressive because transcoding automatically gets an order of magnitude faster by reducing quality. You could probably get x264 to be nearly as fast if you tweaked the output to look like that.

This is really an area AMD needs to invest in.

 

[shangshang]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Only for Vista? Boooo!

They have it for XP too. I've installed it, but don't really know how to use it lol

Not sure why the XP version is only 4.2 mb while the Vista is 22.9 mb! Wow, that's a big difference.

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
I mean today, right now, AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated, in spite of the fact that AMD initially said it was when it was released. AMD has been wholly incapable of delivering hardware encoding acceleration for 4 years now, I don't expect that to change overnight.

Oh, I thought you meant 'no hardware decoding'. My bad.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: lopri

Originally posted by: ViRGE
I mean today, right now, AVIVO isn't hardware accelerated, in spite of the fact that AMD initially said it was when it was released. AMD has been wholly incapable of delivering hardware encoding acceleration for 4 years now, I don't expect that to change overnight.

Oh, I thought you meant 'no hardware decoding'. My bad.

Yeah, sorry, I should have been clearer. I keep forgetting that for some daft reason ATI calls both their decoder features and their transcoder package AVIVO.

And for anyone wondering why I get all bent out of shape on the matter with ATI, this is why. 1500 days and counting, I'm still waiting for my MPEG-4 encoding acceleration.

 

[shangshang]

video encoding/decoding has always been an after thought for all the highend 3d-oriented graphics cards. Perhaps somday when more people demand multimedia PC, they will make graphic cards specifically for the multimedia segment too. But I won't hold my breath.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And here all this time I thought that ATI DID have GPU/shader-accelerated video encoding. Guess I fell for their marketing mis-speak.

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
And here all this time I thought that ATI DID have GPU/shader-accelerated video encoding. Guess I fell for their marketing mis-speak.

They do, incoming in the next PowerDirector 7. Source

In their presentations, AMD has stressed the importance of the amount of processing power their stream processors bring to the table in various applications including video transcoding. Through CyberLink?s upcoming Power Director 7, users will be able to simultaneously transcode multiple 1080P videos up to 19 times faster than they would if they were using a dual core processor. Coupled with the low power consumption of the HD4800-series processors, the possibility of using this feature in numerous video encoding and decoding applications is virtually boundless.