GPU Optimized Video Converter

[Soopafresh]

Stumbled upon a new piece of software (in beta) called BadaBoom, which converts many different formats (including AVCHD) to h264 .MP4 . What's interesting about this product is that it uses the relatively new Nividia CUDA technology - moving the transcoding engine to the GPU rather than the CPU on traditional conversion utils.

Did a short test with a 85MB AVCHD .MTS file, comparing the transcoding time between BadaBoom and my batch scripted vimeo converter https://forum.videohelp.com/images/guides/p1814962/avchd_convert__vimeo_v7.zip .

Results:

On an 8 core XP box, Nvidia 8600 card

Output: 1280x720 2500k deinterlaced

Badaboom: 13.6fps 5% CPU utilization

avchd_convert__vimeo_v7: 16.5fps 44% CPU utilization

On a machine with less cores, BadaBoom would show an even faster relative transcoding speed. Looks like there's potential there. I wish the BadaBoom output would be more than h264 MP4, however.

You can check out the Beta yourself. You need to update your Nvidia drivers to a fairly new build, or look for a file named nvcuda.dll on your drive to ensure your drivers are already CUDA optimized. I used 177.89 for testing

http://www.badaboomit.com/

[Baldrick]

And I just bought an ati hd 4870 graphic card. . .

[poisondeathray]

more info & testing here, the guys at doom9 have been following this for a while , there was also a preview in Anandtech (link to that article can be found in the thread below)

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847

It's a promising start, but if you turn down the x264 settings to make it equivalent, CPU encoding on most modern systems is still faster.

Quality is not the greatest, but the final release version is supposed to support "Main" profile at least (instead of just "baseline")

OK for 1st generation, let's hope they can improve on it

[jagabo]

Too bad it's such a piece of crap:

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

[ABaugh]

Don't worry, ATI is also working on this.

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/3307.page

You're ATI card will work with that software, if you want to try it out.

[FulciLives]

And I just bought an ati hd 4870 graphic card. . .

Oh wow ... very nice. I wish I could afford that bad boy

- John "FulciLives" Coleman