Hardware mpeg-2 encoding With All In Wonder. Is It Possible?

[NiCoTiKo]

I just got an Ati All In Wonder Radeon. My first capture card.

I’m very happy with the capturing capability, this model does mpeg-2 real time encoding by hardware, and all the bad comment I’ve read seam not to be true in my case. No frame drops, very good quality for the price.

It takes for any software like TMPGEnc around 28 hours to encode to mpeg-2 if you use high-quality settings… So I Wonder:

¿ Is there any software in the world that could use my Ati hardware capabilities to encode a file to mpeg-2 ?. (that includes a Beta software somewhere, or any way to take advantage of the hardware mpeg-2 encoding capability)

… I can’t understand why a hardware encoder is supplied with a software to encode what you capture, and not with one to encode a simple file, such an avi or a vob. I love to rip DVD’s; Is this card going to help my at all with the encoding (of files), or it can only be used to capture?

[miamicanes]

I've asked the same question myself.

The Rage Theatre chip doesn't do hardware MPEG capture per se, but it has hardware to perform and accelerate some of the more time-consuming aspects involved (DCT/iDCT, motion searching, etc.) -- kind of like how Intel and AMD CPUs have instructions dedicated to operations common and time-consuming with 3-D rendering. Software is still needed to tie it all together, but the end result is better than relying entirely upon the CPU's x86 general-purpose operations to pull it off instead.

My personal theory is that ATI sold its soul to the devil (the DVD Forum).

In order to license the intellectual property necessary to legally sell software for DVD playback in the US, they had to guarantee that the way they implemented Macrovision protection on playback was Secure™, and probably got their arm twisted into agreeing to cripple the capture capabilities so it would detect and refuse to capture Macrovision-protected content as a condition of licensure in the first place.

I suspect that ATI's lawyers had a frank discussion with the driver team, who probably admitted that it would be trivially easy for anyone with access to the low-level hardware info to hack around all the protections demanded by the DVD Forum and basically render ATI in breach of it, leaving ATI wide open to a lawsuit or worse. The lawyers told ATI Management they'd be suicidal to make the info freely available, and ATI Management itself decided it wasn't worth the expense and hassle to share it with anyone except maybe a select few strategic partners who signed onerous legal documents binding them to the same terms as ATI and mandating non-disclosure to anyone else (and paid lots of money for the privilege).

Ergo, ATI forces third parties to treat the Rage Theatre capture as a black box encapsulated by WDM as their way to enforce the rules imposed upon them by the DVD Forum, even if it means forcing users to sacrifice usability. ATI itself would probably love to see the info freely available, because it would make everybody else's videocapture chipsets a distant second-best by comparison (I'm sure ATI personally holds lots of patents on the RT chipset's capabilities). But, sadly, Hollywood has won. For now, at least.