I use convertxtodvd right now and it's a great app. I would like to know if there is a way to use CUDA to do the same job and race my gtx 280's against the i7 cpu. (yes i'm that sad) Anybody ever done this? I'm aware of nero move it and badaboom but looking at them without having tried the softwares they appear to only convert file types. AVI>MKV etc. Bit tech?
I use Badaboom - it converts AVI's to MP4's in a variety of sizes but doesn't create DVD's. Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 will use CUDA, but generally only on transitions.
Yes, Badaboom will convert it just fine. The problem with Badaboom is that it aimed at the lower end of the market, the whole converting video for your iPod idea. CUDA just isn't that good for video encoding. To make a long story short, these are some quotes from the developers of Handbrake, a popular open source encoder. If you want quality, you'll want to be using a good CPU based encoder.
The quality of the video you get from Badaboom is pretty good to be fair and speed wise it certainly keeps up with my i7. If I get some time tomorrow I'll time them both. edit - Video_TS to iphone mp4 - 1500kb/s - 6248MB file Badaboom - average fps 240 - 17 mins, 33 seconds. Handbrake - same settings - average FPS 180. Sorry no time to let it finish.
To downscale HD movies to SD movies I use Any Video Converter. It's quite easy to set it to render using DirectX or OpenGL (both video card accelerated). I don't see why you would want to use CPU-based encoding, GPUs are so much better at decoding/encoding video (after all, it's the sort of massively parallel workload that they excel at). My HD5850 decoding using DirectX is far faster than my i7-920, in fact the limiting factor on speed is how quickly the content can be read from and written back to my RAID array. As for "quality", we're talking about standard definition (DVD quality) video here. It's like arguing over the difference between 128kb/s and 160kb/s MP3; both are low quality and I you can't discern the difference between them.
Incidently it is with high definition content where GPGPU encoding comes into its own. I may try the same exercise again but with the Red Dead Redemption short film - its half hour of 720p.
Video quality is much more noticeable than audio quality. When you've got massive blocks in the middle of your screen, it's pretty obvious The reason why most apps use the CPU is because no competitive GPU encoder has been released yet. By that I mean really good bandwidth. When CUDA was released, there were lots of numbers like this being pushed around: They are complete crap. See how the 3GHz quad core is only slightly faster than the 1.2GHz dual core? It's a single threaded encoder they used. That is a much more accurate CPU encoder of the time. We hadn't even seen the output of such encoders. In the first reviews, they actually only tested it at very low resolutions, where differences in picture quality are not that visible. The reason why most apps use the CPU is actually because video encoding is not inherently massively parallel, and it's hard to do it as such. x264, the open source H.264 encoder scales really well up to 16 cores due to some really clever multithreading, but it doesn't scale well pass there, and you really need between 128 and 256 core utilization for CUDA to shine. There are plenty of applications for CUDA. Unfortunately, video encoding is not one of them, and CPU encoding still wins out in terms of quality.
