Third party compression with ATI hardware possible?

[mrtristan]

I was just curious if it's possible for an application like Tmpgenc to use the ATI AIW's hardware compression for mpeg and mpeg2. Let's assume that the author of the software had the itch to add that functionality to his program. Could it be done?

Or are the compression algorithms and other technical things that I don't understand not compatable?

Since you can capture using mpeg2 in real time (assuming you get ATI's software to work), I was thinking that encoding times could really be speeded up, if the cpu could communicate with the capture card and borrow it's hardware compression.

[Muffzilla]

I would like to point out that only the AIW 9700 and above have partial mpeg hardware encoding. It is not something that every AIW has, just the AIW 9700 and newer, and it is only partial, taking perhaps 5% off cpu usage. I would also imagine that the ATI apps are written to take advantage of this specially. Any other program would have to be doctored to use the HW compression.

[txpharoah]

I would like to point out that only the AIW 9700 and above have partial mpeg hardware encoding. It is not something that every AIW has, just the AIW 9700 and newer, and it is only partial, taking perhaps 5% off cpu usage. I would also imagine that the ATI apps are written to take advantage of this specially. Any other program would have to be doctored to use the HW compression.

Actually, ATI has never specifically commented on this one way or another. I assume it to be due to legal reasons. Supposedly, all of the AIW chips contain aspects of Ligos GoMotion MPEG technology, providing mostly hardware encoding. The capture software itself would not suffice in MPEG capture. But yes, the new 9700 has a newly-created MPEG chip made specifically by ATI, in addition to other chips and updates of chips found on previous cards.

If you notice, ATI doesn't even promote the MPEG encoding. I've looked into this a few times, but I don't have the time anymore. I don't understand enough about computer chips to reverse engineer or analyze them. All I know is what I read in industry reports and what I experience first-hand.