Does Vegas use DirectX Video Acceleration?

BGil wrote on 8/18/2004, 8:07 AM

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmform95/htm/enablingdirectxvideoacceleration.asp
I was reading this review on an HDTV tuner card than has the ability to use a Radeon or Geforce card's built in MPEG-2 encoder/decoder because it lacks one of it's own to make the device cheaper). I think it's an interesting concept and I was wondering if Vegas had this ability. Now, I know the Vegas philosophy is not to use hardware accelerators but using the video card that comes as part of every computer isn't the same as trying to do something like PPro and Matrox. It's just good use of hardware.

From the looks of everything this feature is built right into Direct X and Windows Media so one could easily get the API's or SDK for something like this.

Here's the review o the HDTV card:
http://www.amdpower.com/sections.php4?op=viewarticle&artid=112

Comments

farss wrote on 8/18/2004, 8:11 AM

In a word no but with frame serving maybe it could be done. However at that level of mpeg-2 encoding I'd suspect the software encoders would do a much better job. Certainly high end hardware encoders can outperform most software encoders but that probably has as much to do with how the video is fed into them than anything else.

Bob.

BGil wrote on 8/18/2004, 8:23 AM

Well, I would think that the hardware encoder on a Radeon would at least be decent and partially off-loading WM9 or MPEG-2 encoding to a hardware decoder would speed things up a lot. Isn't that what Pinnacle Liquid Edition does. Is there some reason why Sony/Sonic Foundry hasn't allowed Vegas to do the same? Is Sony planning to do such a thing now that they are trying to support more hardware (Decklink cards)?

I know that Longhorn will have a few more systems for stuff like that and it would be nice to see that in Vegas one day.

---------

Does anyone know if Sony plans to support and use any of the new Longhorn features like WinFS for media organization and stuff, Windows Media Services for video encoding and Filter accceleration etc.?

planders wrote on 8/18/2004, 8:53 AM

I suspect that the main issue would be lack of control over the output. Vegas would send its data stream to the encoder, which then does who-knows-what to it. At a bare minimum, most of the built-in MPEG accelerators in consumer video cards have their own set of colour controls or automatic image "enhancements" that can give a distorted impression of the video.

By only supporting external preview over firewire and keeping encoding "in-house," Sony can ensure that what you see represents the data stream that Vegas is actually producing.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/18/2004, 9:38 AM

I think Adobe says they will support some fancy video feature in the GeForce 6xxx series, but I haven't heard anything else about that. This was months ago. The video work in the NVidia is different then the ATI though.

I'm sure a wrapper (or something) could be made to do this, but it might not be worth the work. On newer computers you are able to get faster then RT encoding.

However, if you wanted, you could buy 2 comps, ones with an ATI or Geforce video capture card, a Firewire to analog converter, then play through the firewire to the analog card.

It would work. Be a pain, but would work. :)

PenfoldShush wrote on 8/19/2004, 10:42 AM

I've been wondering about the 6xxx Geforce series myself. Nvidia announced the 6600 last week at Quake Con. It is supposed to have this on chip video processor on it too. I remember Adobe saying they would support it, I can only hope that Sony will too.

Taken from
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_on-chip-video.html

"Video Encoding
The GeForce 6 Series GPUs are also capable of hardware video encode acceleration. Traditionally, video encoding is a difficult and time consuming process. The GeForce 6 Series GPUs include a motion estimation engine. Using state-of-the-art technologies, the motion estimation engine delivers higher-quality video at the same or lower bit rate, as well as lower CPU utilization for improved system performance."

*EDIT*
Just for the heck of it, I took a look at ATI's site and they boast the same thing for X800, and probably the X600 and X300 but I was too lazy to look.