Does the SpursEngine devices, IE Leadtek's WinFast PxVC1100 work good?

[TBoneit]

Hello

To put it another way Are SpursEngine devices such as Leadtek's WinFast PxVC1100 worth the money and give good results? I'd be using it with TMPGEnc Xpress4 using their plug-in.

I did a encode from 1080i capture from a HD-PVR to DVD Two pass encode that took overnight to do. I'd like to really shorten that time for those occasions when I want to do that sort of thing. I saw poisondeathray mention
"5) Hardware is overclocked Core i7, it's actually faster for encoding than my previous generation dual socket quad Harpertown workstation. I've investigated dedicated hardware encoders (cards based on spurs engine), and video card encoders (badaboom, avivo), and they are severely limited in terms of quality. Not something you would want to use for clients or quality HD output. There are plenty of comparison, samples, graphs, links to other reviews at Doom9 on the the above. " from here https://forum.videohelp.com/topic367429.html?highlight=spurs engine

Anybody else have experience with these?

Thanks
RT

[jagabo]

From what I've read, Badaboom seems to have improved a bit since then. Avivo is still crap.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3374

Open source CUDA option: media coder
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic370477.html

[poisondeathray]

I've stayed pretty up to date on recent developments since that thread you linked

Speed is good, but if image quality has any high weighting in your decision criteria , you probably won't want use either badaboom or spurs engine.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcinlife.com%2Farticle%2Fgrap...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

If you look at the ssim graphs, basically it shows spurs engine is worse than badaboom which worse than x264...If you look at the review samples in that thread and others, the image quality is dreadful compared to x264 at any equivalent bitrate

The badaboom 1.2.1 update hasn't improved anything quality wise, only GUI changes and minor tweaks

Search for the threads on Doom9, there are a couple of users that have cards based the spurs engine. They posted review samples, you can PM them if you want more info.

x264 500kbps


spurs engine 500kbps


ssim graph


If you are looking for a compromise, (like using bigger file size or bitrate for the same quality - you need 30-70% larger filesize just to get equivalent quality), just to get it done a bit faster, this might be ok for you.

EDIT: I just noticed you are encoding to DVD? not to h.264? There is no way a MPEG2 DVD-Video encode should take overnight if your system specs are correct. You must be having other issues with your system

[TBoneit]

Yeah it seemed a bit long to me also. Normal encodes go pretty good so i may have been the filtering I was doing, I just remembered I was filtering during the encode.

With regard to the quality, Yikes!

I was going from a 9meg 1080i AVCHD h.264 capture to standard DVD as much as a test as for any other reason. TSPE to trim the captures and then they play fine in the WD media player.

The part that piqued my interest was that it is supposed to be able to upresolution using the bundled software in good quality. OTOH $2xx is a fair amount of money in these times.

Thanks for the feedback
In summary I guess I'll save my money, no magic bullet there.
Cheers