Faster encodes with Avivo Video Converter

Jayster wrote on 3/21/2006, 12:18 PM

Has anyone tested ATI's new v6.3 driver, which on x1000 series graphics cards includes their "Avivo Video Converter"? Apparently it uses hardware acceleration on the GPU to greatly speed transcoding (i.e. converting from one format to another).

A review on Extreme Tech discusses test results. For comparison, they encoded a video clip to WMV9 on an Athlon XP2 4800 and it took 4 minutes 35 seconds. Using ATI's Avivo app with an ATI X1800 video card, it took only 24 seconds. That's a huge difference! The review is at
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1880669,00.asp

It would be really interesting to see if someone has tried this app (anyone with an ATI x1000 or higher card could do it). How good is it? Can you do HDV encodes? That would be really cool, if you could have Vegas render to a Cineform HDV file then convert it into WMVHD or H.264 without needing 20+ hours to do the transcode, and without having Vegas crash on "out of memory" errors.

The beta that ExtremeTech reviewed had no audio capabilities. I wonder if the released one fixed that. (Seems like it must have, or nobody would use it).

Anybody have experience with this?

Comments

p@mast3rs wrote on 3/21/2006, 3:59 PM

ATI is faster but the result is complete and utter crap.

Jayster wrote on 3/22/2006, 8:02 AM

How is it "utter crap"? Lack of configureability in its profiles? Are the bitrates too low?

Has anyone else tried it?

Chienworks wrote on 3/22/2006, 10:30 AM

I haven't seen ATI's new stuff, but the MPEG produced by their All-in-Wonder series cards looks like you left the film in your back pocket when you washed and dried your jeans. The image just looks .... crumpled. I can't really hold that against them considering they were producing real-time MPEG renders back when 300MHz was a fast computer. But, in order to get that sort of encoding speeds a lot of shortcuts have to be taken. I think they take too many.