How's CF going to leverage this?

[Stephen Armour]

David, thought this article very interesting and especially this paragraph:

"...The other interesting demo was a GPU-accelerated encoding plugin for Adobe Premiere Elements. Using the power of a Radeon 3870 card, it was able to encode a one minute hi-def video clip to a hi-def Windows Media file in about 20 seconds. Easy-to-use, GPU-accelerated video encoding built into packages like Premiere, Nero, Pinnacle Studio, and so forth can't come soon enough..."

link: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2218305,00.asp

How's CF going to take advantage of this? Since you don't currently use GPU-acceleration, your competition might, and this could really turbopower video editing, couldn't it?

[David Newman]

No issue, those export plug-in with work for CineForm projects as well.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by David Newman

No issue, those export plug-in with work for CineForm projects as well.

Ride the wave...

[Paul Cook]

I seem to remember ATi releasing something similar years ago for accelerated mpeg that supposedly used the 'power' of their cards and could only be used on ati hardware.

That was until a never to be released beta version of the encoder got out and it was discovered anyone could use it as it actually DIDNT use the GPU to do anything, just clever shortcuts to make the encode faster but of less quality.

So no idea if ATI are up to their old tricks again but I will say that if WME at this stage cant even take advantage of more than 4 cores to process WMVHD, I find it odd that ATI suddenly have the answer to something infinitely more complex via GPU acceleration.

At this stage Im more interested Intels QX9650 with SSE4 which provides significant optimization for H.264 type encoding/decoding.

[Richard Leadbetter]

Windows Media Encoder is multithreaded, or rather the encoding component (used with many different encoding suites) is.

I have to admit to treating this news with some degree of suspicion. 3x realtime encoding of HD WMV is completely unheard of.

I've been doing a lot of work with WMV recently, and my results have been drastically improved thanks to some assistance from Microsoft's Ben Waggoner.

First of all, download this. It's a cool registry-tweaking tool that directly affects elements of the encoder: http://www.citizeninsomniac.com/WMV/#WMV9PowerToy

Ben's "max quality" settings with Windows Media 9 Advanced Profile are as follows:

DQuant Option: I and P frames
DQuant Method: Regular
Perceptual Option: Adaptive Deadzone 1
In-Loop Filter: On
Overlap Filter: On if you're getting any blocking
Motion Search Level: Luma + True Chroma
Motion Search Range: Adaptive
Motion Match Method: Adaptive (note this slows things down quite a bit relative to the quality improvement)
B-Frame Number: 1
Lookahead: 16 (only used in 1-pass encoding mode).

First of all you'll note that your encoding is now much, much slower. Also, if you can bear an even slower encode, there are small quality benefits from disabling multithreading and running the encoder with one core only (threads: 1).

After making the changes, any WMVs you encode from any application (assuming it's using Microsoft's encoder behind the scenes, which I suspect it will be) will look a LOT better, or offer significantly higher picture quality with fewer bits.

I can't help but think that if these GPU-accelerated options were real, Microsoft would be integrating them into their VC1 encoder, which offers incredible quality but is also remarkably slow. That said, Microsoft uses the ATI GPU in the Xbox 360 to accelerate WMV decoding for HD DVD (not WMVs from the dashboard), so it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Paul Cook

I seem to remember ATi releasing something similar years ago for accelerated mpeg that supposedly used the 'power' of their cards and could only be used on ati hardware.

That was until a never to be released beta version of the encoder got out and it was discovered anyone could use it as it actually DIDNT use the GPU to do anything, just clever shortcuts to make the encode faster but of less quality.

So no idea if ATI are up to their old tricks again but I will say that if WME at this stage cant even take advantage of more than 4 cores to process WMVHD, I find it odd that ATI suddenly have the answer to something infinitely more complex via GPU acceleration.

At this stage Im more interested Intels QX9650 with SSE4 which provides significant optimization for H.264 type encoding/decoding.

Here's some more reviews:
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/...50_55nm_RV670/

Doesn't look like vaporware anymore: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151&p=2

No matter, nVidia needs some competition and this will be welcomed as we can only gain by this kind of support.

Thanks for the PowerToy tweak link, Richard. Very cool!

[Paul Cook]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

Here's some more reviews:
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/...50_55nm_RV670/

Doesn't look like vaporware anymore: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151&p=2

The problem is there is nothing in those articles proving it isn’t vaporware. They don’t even mention encoding of WMVHD and they surely dont show any graphs highlighting the performance increase. They go into a lot of detail for decoding...but not encoding.

So while I’m keen for it to be true, and we all know there is amazing horse power locked up in GPU's, I remain skeptical until I see a review that 'shows us the money' with a deep analysis, benchmarks and quality tests.

[Stephen Armour]

Unfortunately true. The spin doctors are experts at their trade, so until we see the hard proof in reduced render times with real hardware, we can only hope.