Legit Video Card Reviews
Badaboom Media Converter v1.1.1
| Manufacturer: | NVIDIA |
| Product: | Badaboom Media Converter v1.1.1 |
| Date: | Thu, Feb 05, 2009 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Badaboom Media Converter v1.1.1 Part 2
After seeing what the old version could do I installed Badaboom Media Converter v1.1.1 to see what the latest version was like after just using the original release. For starters, the Blackberry Bold is now available as an output option and the video file bitrate is pre-set to 1000bkit! The output resolution is now 480x270, which looks better on the 480x320 Transmissive TFT LCD display than 320x320 did with v1.0 utility!
It took 30 seconds less time to transcode the movie at the same bit rate of 1000bkit with version 1.1.1 than version 1.0, even with a higher resolution output size! The file size was predicted as being 813MB, which was 1MB off from the real file size of 812MB. Elemental Technologies did a great job improving the estimated file size!
Just for fun I also converted one of my many FRAPS movies to a You Tube file format (480x360 output resolution), and sure enough it works great, but it is being decoded by the CPU and not the GPU for some reason.
I've asked Elemental Technologies why the transcoding is being done by the CPU and not the GPU and was informed the following.
In Badaboom 1.1 we introduced support for many additional formats (1.1.1 adds FRAPS). In order to support the decode of all of these codecs we decided to take advantage of the CPU for decoding when either the hardware is not available on the GPU or we have not already written a decoder in CUDA for the GPU. On the CPU side there are many decoders that have existed for a very long time and it just made more sense to leverage them rather than try to create our own on the GPU. FRAPS is a good example in that writing a decoder on the GPU in CUDA (or from scratch on the CPU) would take a couple of weeks but integrating an decoder that already existed on the CPU only took a couple of days.
In addition not all GPUs are created equally some have more hardware decoders than others. In the 1.0 release we only supported GPU decodes this resulted in people with older cards getting messages saying that they needed to upgrade their GPU if they wanted to transcode certain types of content (AVCHD for example). In order to get around this situation and to support older codecs (DivX, Xvid, FRAPS, etc…) quickly we put in a CPU decoder which we fall back on if a GPU decoder is not available.
The encoding is always is done on the GPU regardless of where the decoding is done. The main difference you may notice between GPU and CPU decoding will likely be a slightly higher CPU utilization. A possible second difference may be seen in the speed of the transcode but this will depend on the combination of your CPU and GPU.
Since it takes under 20 seconds for the CPU to decode a 280MB FRAPS movie it really isn't a big deal, but it is still interesting to see the CPU do the work instead of the GPU.
Legit Bottom Line: If you have an NVIDIA graphics card that supports CUDA and do movie transcoding, then give Badaboom v1.1.1 a close look as it has more features and is more user friendly than ever before.
Questions or Comments? View this thread in our forums!
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