"and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there"
Stopped reading there. What a load of bull.
The bandwidth is just not there? Wireless N (the standard) can do up to 600 Mb/s. Most devices support up to 300 Mb/s.
In practice and depending on the environment, you get about 100 Mb/s.
Blu-ray 1080p is maybe 30Mb/s.
It's connectivity, not bandwidth. Besides, most videos you download online or encode yourself are very very unlikely to cross the 6 to 8 Mb/s barrier. That stuff usually only goes on HD media (such as HDTV or Blu-ray).
Even Wireless B could manage that. The trick is streaming the encoded data to where you want it to be watched, and decoding it on that device.
If you're trying to stream raw video data, then of course you can't. It's not meant to be streamed or be stored on anything.
The missing line that connects all the dots here is a beefy home video media server that transcodes & streams to all your uPnP / mobile-wireless devices, such as the PS3, Wii, XBox360, PSP, iPhone, wifi enabled phones, wifi Archos, laptops, etc.
ATI/AMD has dropped the ball. They tossed their home entertainment chip (Xileon - All-In-Wonder) group, so it doesn't appear they want in this space. They aborted the whole transcode deal after X1000. Is Hollywood (and possibly Cable co's) putting on the pressure?
Now if transcoding multiple streams by a media server with Nvidia cards make it easy to feed a whole house load of people / devices wirelessly (draft-n 2.0 with dual-band), imagine the next reaction for big media would be to squash it. They don't want people having huge collections of movies, be it in h.264, XVID, or WMV format on some multi-terabyte home server (there are some nice single purpose living-room jukebox multi-media players like TOMACRO or TVIX that can access wireless file-servers as well, or stand-alone DIVX DVD players with USB connectivity - to a external USB HDD e.g. cheap 500GB+ storage) which can pump video on demand out. It can then inch out into the SlingBox territory where you can serve out to the net; which TVersity, Orb, etc. others can do, but security and lock-down is for the more technically inclined.
The better the transcoder, the better the bit-rate per stream, and then if that target is reached, the transcoder PC can crunch out even more streams. Most media servers are so-so at the 480p level, much less acceptable quality at 720p or dare tread on 1080p content with decent frame rates; and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there. But what's to stop some indie service to blast Hulu and YouTube like sites with VOD services? Is NetFlix or ComCast or TimeWarner going to be able to put such powerful transcoder cards to task so they can bring real VOD library to the masses? The state of the art today for the consumer is rather toy-like, and I bet Hollywood would rather it stay that way.
Will this bring cable TV to a true a-la-carte vision were VOD servers rule the day where time schedules will end (TV Guides will be revamped to a library style navigation) and can serve up to any wireless device in your house through the STB / (future) hub? Send a upstream request for a PSP client to get a movie, and the cable company downstreams the best specific format; or a SD-TV in the bedroom via an XBox360 for junior, or the HD-TV in the livingroom, all crunched out by the big iron video servers behind the scenes at the cable co. home base using Nvidia cards (or maybe a few 9500Ms in SLI mode and optimized for CUDA to perform local transcode on the STB?) This second scenario is more likely, where control is under Hollywood's management.
If you were able to download raw TS off a DVR to a PC, the genie would be out of the bottle. Take the raw file, crunch to an acceptable compressed codec, then transcode as needed. Why showcase all your DVD boxes on a shelf? Just have a 2 TB+ SAN with a media server and a wireless-g/n gigabit router to serve all your wireless devices (and quite affordable if you know what you're doing but poor quality). The next step is to have complete transcodes done for your device to take with you on the go and out of wired/wireless range without a middleman approach of using a PC to manage the file drop to a media card. Just pick what you want to store locally on the PVP device instead of stream for later. Imagine that done 10x faster. Imagine 10x the amount of devices you can serve in the house. Your bedroom media hub, the living room media hub, the kids XBox360/PS3/Wii, the kids PSP, your Archos for the transmit commute, your iPhone (for those bathroom breaks - you wouldn't drive and watch your iPhone would you?), a laptop or two, an eeePC in the kitchen for streaming the Food Network, etc. Devices are getting smaller, mobile, and multi-function, yet there needs to be that mainstay PC to be the workhorse video transcoder.
The encode times are alright but it still uses about 50%-60% of my idle E8400 as well. Also it's not good for encoding Hi-Def content as it drops a ton of frames that made the few hour long encodes I did recycle bin material. I'm not impressed at all. It seems they should have added some more options and polished it a lot more or not bothered releasing it just yet.
That said it seems like the crowd they are aiming for is the people who really don't care about quality (Or can't tell the difference) and just want to play their PSP's and XBox360's and watch some movies on it once in a while. It seems the wrong target IMO as it's the gamers and enthusiasts who own the necessary hardware to see any benefits of Badaboom. Even my 8800GTX didn't seem to chew through encodes like was claimed. In fact It maybe cut the time in half compared to converting a file in Nero, minus the better quality. If they could really get it to work as they bragged about a year ago it would be something.
You can check out the GeForce Power Pack to see for yourselves.
Downloaded the trial version last week as part of the nvidia driver bundle, and so wanted it to work after reading about it in Maximum PC. Seems extremely picky when it comes to the file types it supports, and would crash so much.
Perhaps when it's more stable, and supports more file formats i'll try again
The power consumption numbers are only applicable if the application shuts the computer down after completion.
Otherwise idle draw must be subtracted from load draw.
Whichever has a bigger difference between idle and load will therefore be more efficient if running at the same time as web browsing, office work, downloading or other activities such as running the computer as a file server.
Never had a problem with PowerDVD since before the year 2000. Once in a while it will crash, but most of the time that is due to media having flaws(such as DVD disks have deep scratches).
HD Video Media is not exactly PC friendly to begin with, and the "DRM specification committee" likes it that way. Maybe we should place some blame on Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Warner Bros., IBM, Toshiba and Sony as well ? Drivers ? Hardware ?
MY OPINION is that since Cyberlink was founded in the mid 90's, and has been writing media based software since at least the late 90's is that: they can not do any worse than this company whom I have never even heard of before now.
Lets not forget that most people who own PowerDVD, got it free with their $36 usd DVD player . . .
Either way, yes this software reviewed is JUNK the way it stands. Hopefully someone will come along and do it right, and MAYBE, the application will even be free :) Something tells me Adobe is paying attention here though . . .
I want to see a review with Cyberlink's ATI GPGPU implementation of hardware transcoding. Cyberlink will probably have their software code a lot cleaner and usable and the HD4870 should have plenty of horsepower if theoretical peak FLOPS is any measure.
Wait... did you just talk about clean code and Cyberlink with a straight face!? I think every new version of PowerDVD gets worse, and I've had way too many difficulties with Blu-ray playback and their software (especially the OEM bundled version). Still, maybe they'll get it right with the ATI transcoding. And maybe I'll win the lottery.... :-)
Anand compares an x264 setting that is higher quality than badaboom's. He should have stopped right there, but instead he publishes numbers that show that badaboom is faster.
You can't compare speeds if they aren't of similar quality!
I must admit I never understood the consumer desire for anything more than reasonable multimedia encoding times. If I buy a new movie, and want to rip it to my computer, I only have to do it *once.* To some, any speedup they can get is well worth the price, but I honestly don't care how long it takes, as long as it's less than, say overnight, or even overnight plus whatever extra time it needs until I get home from work the next day.
I understand the desire for faster computation of tasks that involve a lot of user interaction: games, web browsing, office applications, and basically the whole lot of interactive GUI-driven programs, but I never saw the draw of blazingly fast set-it-and-forget-it type computations. I can leave the computer on overnight to perform a task if need be. I personally care about quality, and whether the file can be played back in real time on the target platform. File size is important, too, but with 1TB hard drives coming in at about $125, that has started to matter a lot less.
While I *do* understand why this could provide enormous benefit to professionals working with video, any consumer of DVD movies or amateur videographer should be more than happy with what we have now. I don't see the outcry for faster word processors, and that's because computers perform that function well enough to be usable by consumers or amateurs for whom time is *not* money when it comes to using their computers.
I must admit though, I can take a chill pill and leave the computer for days at a time, as long as my RSS reader catches the daily web updates, so I might not be the average reader of tech sites.
(Once it took my old iBook *ten* days to compile KDE 3.5 from source!)
Well, transcoding to a master high quality copy for long term storage, maybe. But when you want to take those with you on a portable device, you have to transcode. I'm not a fan of having multiple copies of things, despite the cost of hard drives, so I'd much rather a way to speedily convert that for me.
My problem is I want to convert in bulk, which means either a nice job manager in your GUI, or a documented CLI for the app.
There are no options to control the number of passes the encoder does, this is simply a single-pass transcode that can happen in greater than real time depending on your GPU.
Depending on the format of the video stream it may be able to support it.
Elemental is considering adding Main profile support to Badaboom, but right now it's reserved for the Premier plugin.
While what you say is true to an extent, we're testing the value of a specific piece of hardware to perform certain work. Using your logic, gaming benchmarks are worthless as well, because it's not like you're going to play games all the time.
We can look at the power question in a lot of ways. It appears an E4500 would do about just as well as the Q6600 used in testing, so for power should we compare Q6600 with IGP to E4500 with GTX 280 (or 9800)? That's certainly one valid comparison point, but if you go that route you quickly get to the stage where you have so many valid points of comparison that the project becomes unmanageable.
Personally, I assume most users understand that this is a look at energy efficiency for a specific task, and not a holistic look at PC power use. What it tells us is that in heavily bottlenecked situations, GPU encoding is far more efficient than CPU encoding. That's useful information. Now we just need a good codec and application to back it up.
Since this is still a beta version, I have to wonder how much could possibly change by end of release? Were you able to talk to Elemental to address the issues with the beta and the dissapointment in the "advanced" settings?
The Pro edition seems dissapointing, but if they ironed out the kinks in the end... I'd be interested in picking it up. Will there be a follow-up review for the release version?
I've kept Elemental aware of all of the issues I've had. I gave them some suggestions back after my first preview of the software. Every single problem I've encountered Elemental has added to their list of things to QA for, I'm hoping we'll see some significant improvements in the next major release.
I will keep an open dialogue with Elemental and definitely look at any significant changes in the future.
Oh jeez.. are these guys retarded or what??? baseline only.. wake up guys.. everyone uses HIGH at least level 4.1..
this is a typical example of windows software. all GUI and no go..
what we need here is an open source version.. x264 is a perfect example of superior quality software surpassing close source .. now if only you "professionals" could do the same..
given, that most blu-ray content is already a varient of the efficent mp4 (avc,vc-1,x264 etc etc).
to compress it just for the shake of saving file space seems foolish.
IMHO, in most cases, the file on the blu-ray has been encoded to give you the best possible picture in that file size. No automagic program is going to somehow make the file size smaller, and maintain the same quality.
Now if converting to a smaller resolution, theres a point, but then data loss is a given.
IMHO, this solution would ideal for a gamer that wants to work with video, since inalot of cases more cores dont make a difference in gaming... yet make sense for data compression, you could have the best of both worlds, buy a higher speed, dual core, and use the money saved on a faster video card....
True, but at 20-40 GB per BRD even a 1TB HDD runs out of space with only 20-50 movies. A 35 Mbps AVC stream may look "best", but outside of still captures I bet most users wouldn't notice a difference between 35 Mpbs AVC and 20 Mbps AVC... or possibly even 10 to 15 Mbps.
Since the 9600GT isn't too far off the 8800GT in gaming, but has a large difference in the number of SP's (IIRC), it would be interesting to see how the two compare, rather than looking at even lower end cards like the 9500 and 8600's.
Any chance of some additional numbers (even only one benchmark) using the 9600?
Medical imaging and scientific analysis benefitted tremendously from GPU acceleration, but it's rare that you are a gamer with a $400 GPU is going to be searching for oil deposits in his/her spare time on the same machine.
Amen to that. Plus possibly a WPF version of Handbrake to make it look more elegant. I could care less about video preview.
Also, does BadaBoom support reading from ISOs or do I have to mount with DaemonTools?
I have a Q9450 OC'd to 3.2GHz, so I'm pretty happy with my x264 performance. My iPhone movies are usually done in about 3x realtime (90 minute movie in 30 mintues) at 700-900kbit/s, and the PS3/360 movies are done a little bit quicker (since there is no resizing going on, just transcoding).
"Given my experience so far in trying to port the motion search to CUDA, and Avail's hiring of a contractor to attempt to do so, I'd put the quote for porting the whole encoder somewhere on the level of a few million dollars... if you can even find people willing and able to do it."
"GPU encoding has a lot of potential, but it has a lot of weaknesses too. Its a bit like programming for a Cell or an FPGA, except exponentially more of a nightmare."
page 6 appears to have the wrong figure - according to the text, it should show energy use information, but the table currently rendering shows the badaboom regular v. pro comparison.
Isn't the product name Badaboom maybe a Fifth Element reference considering the company has the name Elemental in its name. Just a guess. If that's the case it's slightly cooler.
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38 Comments
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pk977 - Thursday, November 6, 2008 - link
Try to test it!will not purchase on that software.
comatose - Sunday, August 31, 2008 - link
"and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there"Stopped reading there. What a load of bull.
The bandwidth is just not there? Wireless N (the standard) can do up to 600 Mb/s. Most devices support up to 300 Mb/s.
In practice and depending on the environment, you get about 100 Mb/s.
Blu-ray 1080p is maybe 30Mb/s.
It's connectivity, not bandwidth. Besides, most videos you download online or encode yourself are very very unlikely to cross the 6 to 8 Mb/s barrier. That stuff usually only goes on HD media (such as HDTV or Blu-ray).
Even Wireless B could manage that. The trick is streaming the encoded data to where you want it to be watched, and decoding it on that device.
If you're trying to stream raw video data, then of course you can't. It's not meant to be streamed or be stored on anything.
spinportal - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
The missing line that connects all the dots here is a beefy home video media server that transcodes & streams to all your uPnP / mobile-wireless devices, such as the PS3, Wii, XBox360, PSP, iPhone, wifi enabled phones, wifi Archos, laptops, etc.ATI/AMD has dropped the ball. They tossed their home entertainment chip (Xileon - All-In-Wonder) group, so it doesn't appear they want in this space. They aborted the whole transcode deal after X1000. Is Hollywood (and possibly Cable co's) putting on the pressure?
Now if transcoding multiple streams by a media server with Nvidia cards make it easy to feed a whole house load of people / devices wirelessly (draft-n 2.0 with dual-band), imagine the next reaction for big media would be to squash it. They don't want people having huge collections of movies, be it in h.264, XVID, or WMV format on some multi-terabyte home server (there are some nice single purpose living-room jukebox multi-media players like TOMACRO or TVIX that can access wireless file-servers as well, or stand-alone DIVX DVD players with USB connectivity - to a external USB HDD e.g. cheap 500GB+ storage) which can pump video on demand out. It can then inch out into the SlingBox territory where you can serve out to the net; which TVersity, Orb, etc. others can do, but security and lock-down is for the more technically inclined.
The better the transcoder, the better the bit-rate per stream, and then if that target is reached, the transcoder PC can crunch out even more streams. Most media servers are so-so at the 480p level, much less acceptable quality at 720p or dare tread on 1080p content with decent frame rates; and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there. But what's to stop some indie service to blast Hulu and YouTube like sites with VOD services? Is NetFlix or ComCast or TimeWarner going to be able to put such powerful transcoder cards to task so they can bring real VOD library to the masses? The state of the art today for the consumer is rather toy-like, and I bet Hollywood would rather it stay that way.
Will this bring cable TV to a true a-la-carte vision were VOD servers rule the day where time schedules will end (TV Guides will be revamped to a library style navigation) and can serve up to any wireless device in your house through the STB / (future) hub? Send a upstream request for a PSP client to get a movie, and the cable company downstreams the best specific format; or a SD-TV in the bedroom via an XBox360 for junior, or the HD-TV in the livingroom, all crunched out by the big iron video servers behind the scenes at the cable co. home base using Nvidia cards (or maybe a few 9500Ms in SLI mode and optimized for CUDA to perform local transcode on the STB?) This second scenario is more likely, where control is under Hollywood's management.
If you were able to download raw TS off a DVR to a PC, the genie would be out of the bottle. Take the raw file, crunch to an acceptable compressed codec, then transcode as needed. Why showcase all your DVD boxes on a shelf? Just have a 2 TB+ SAN with a media server and a wireless-g/n gigabit router to serve all your wireless devices (and quite affordable if you know what you're doing but poor quality). The next step is to have complete transcodes done for your device to take with you on the go and out of wired/wireless range without a middleman approach of using a PC to manage the file drop to a media card. Just pick what you want to store locally on the PVP device instead of stream for later. Imagine that done 10x faster. Imagine 10x the amount of devices you can serve in the house. Your bedroom media hub, the living room media hub, the kids XBox360/PS3/Wii, the kids PSP, your Archos for the transmit commute, your iPhone (for those bathroom breaks - you wouldn't drive and watch your iPhone would you?), a laptop or two, an eeePC in the kitchen for streaming the Food Network, etc. Devices are getting smaller, mobile, and multi-function, yet there needs to be that mainstay PC to be the workhorse video transcoder.
Mr Roboto - Thursday, August 21, 2008 - link
The encode times are alright but it still uses about 50%-60% of my idle E8400 as well. Also it's not good for encoding Hi-Def content as it drops a ton of frames that made the few hour long encodes I did recycle bin material. I'm not impressed at all. It seems they should have added some more options and polished it a lot more or not bothered releasing it just yet.That said it seems like the crowd they are aiming for is the people who really don't care about quality (Or can't tell the difference) and just want to play their PSP's and XBox360's and watch some movies on it once in a while. It seems the wrong target IMO as it's the gamers and enthusiasts who own the necessary hardware to see any benefits of Badaboom. Even my 8800GTX didn't seem to chew through encodes like was claimed. In fact It maybe cut the time in half compared to converting a file in Nero, minus the better quality. If they could really get it to work as they bragged about a year ago it would be something.
You can check out the GeForce Power Pack to see for yourselves.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewithin/us/downl...">http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewithin/us/downl...
Zak - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
No MKV output? No AC3 passthru? Can you say "half assed"?Z.
The Preacher - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
And what about on-the-fly TV capture into h.264? Let me guess... :)They should rather develop it so it could run on any card with programmable shaders. This is just a waste of time and resource.
foolish501 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Downloaded the trial version last week as part of the nvidia driver bundle, and so wanted it to work after reading about it in Maximum PC. Seems extremely picky when it comes to the file types it supports, and would crash so much.Perhaps when it's more stable, and supports more file formats i'll try again
buzzergrain - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
The power consumption numbers are only applicable if the application shuts the computer down after completion.Otherwise idle draw must be subtracted from load draw.
Whichever has a bigger difference between idle and load will therefore be more efficient if running at the same time as web browsing, office work, downloading or other activities such as running the computer as a file server.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Never had a problem with PowerDVD since before the year 2000. Once in a while it will crash, but most of the time that is due to media having flaws(such as DVD disks have deep scratches).HD Video Media is not exactly PC friendly to begin with, and the "DRM specification committee" likes it that way. Maybe we should place some blame on Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Warner Bros., IBM, Toshiba and Sony as well ? Drivers ? Hardware ?
MY OPINION is that since Cyberlink was founded in the mid 90's, and has been writing media based software since at least the late 90's is that: they can not do any worse than this company whom I have never even heard of before now.
Lets not forget that most people who own PowerDVD, got it free with their $36 usd DVD player . . .
Either way, yes this software reviewed is JUNK the way it stands. Hopefully someone will come along and do it right, and MAYBE, the application will even be free :) Something tells me Adobe is paying attention here though . . .
wingless - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
I want to see a review with Cyberlink's ATI GPGPU implementation of hardware transcoding. Cyberlink will probably have their software code a lot cleaner and usable and the HD4870 should have plenty of horsepower if theoretical peak FLOPS is any measure.JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Wait... did you just talk about clean code and Cyberlink with a straight face!? I think every new version of PowerDVD gets worse, and I've had way too many difficulties with Blu-ray playback and their software (especially the OEM bundled version). Still, maybe they'll get it right with the ATI transcoding. And maybe I'll win the lottery.... :-)prodystopian - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Mike Lowry: ...It's a Limited Edition.Marcus Burnett: You d*mn right it's limited. No cup holder, no back seat...
Yes, I registered to post this.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
ahh, I love that movie. Too bad the sequel was such a letdown.10 points to you my friend :)
-A
Manabu - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
You used too slow profiles. Acording to the handbrake site (http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets)">http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets), the Blind profile should be 4 times faster than the iPhone profile used here. Then, an quadcore leaves the GTX 280 smoking behind. The quality should be then comparable.Further discussion of this new encoder, inclusive by x264 developers: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847
mongoosesRawesome - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Anand compares an x264 setting that is higher quality than badaboom's. He should have stopped right there, but instead he publishes numbers that show that badaboom is faster.You can't compare speeds if they aren't of similar quality!
thebackwash - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
I must admit I never understood the consumer desire for anything more than reasonable multimedia encoding times. If I buy a new movie, and want to rip it to my computer, I only have to do it *once.* To some, any speedup they can get is well worth the price, but I honestly don't care how long it takes, as long as it's less than, say overnight, or even overnight plus whatever extra time it needs until I get home from work the next day.I understand the desire for faster computation of tasks that involve a lot of user interaction: games, web browsing, office applications, and basically the whole lot of interactive GUI-driven programs, but I never saw the draw of blazingly fast set-it-and-forget-it type computations. I can leave the computer on overnight to perform a task if need be. I personally care about quality, and whether the file can be played back in real time on the target platform. File size is important, too, but with 1TB hard drives coming in at about $125, that has started to matter a lot less.
While I *do* understand why this could provide enormous benefit to professionals working with video, any consumer of DVD movies or amateur videographer should be more than happy with what we have now. I don't see the outcry for faster word processors, and that's because computers perform that function well enough to be usable by consumers or amateurs for whom time is *not* money when it comes to using their computers.
I must admit though, I can take a chill pill and leave the computer for days at a time, as long as my RSS reader catches the daily web updates, so I might not be the average reader of tech sites.
(Once it took my old iBook *ten* days to compile KDE 3.5 from source!)
icrf - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Well, transcoding to a master high quality copy for long term storage, maybe. But when you want to take those with you on a portable device, you have to transcode. I'm not a fan of having multiple copies of things, despite the cost of hard drives, so I'd much rather a way to speedily convert that for me.My problem is I want to convert in bulk, which means either a nice job manager in your GUI, or a documented CLI for the app.
LTG - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Does it support 2-pass encoding?Does it encode uncompressed AVI?
Did they say if Main profile is coming, or if it's stuck like that?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
There are no options to control the number of passes the encoder does, this is simply a single-pass transcode that can happen in greater than real time depending on your GPU.Depending on the format of the video stream it may be able to support it.
Elemental is considering adding Main profile support to Badaboom, but right now it's reserved for the Premier plugin.
-A
erikejw - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Good article otherwise.If you gonna sit all day and code 100 movies or whatever this is the appropriate way to calculate energy consumption.
If not you have to include the extra seconds when your computer sit idle and the cpu transcode finishes.
This is how they do when they calculate server energy consumptin.
It is not like the computer instantly go down to 0 w when the coding is done.
JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
While what you say is true to an extent, we're testing the value of a specific piece of hardware to perform certain work. Using your logic, gaming benchmarks are worthless as well, because it's not like you're going to play games all the time.We can look at the power question in a lot of ways. It appears an E4500 would do about just as well as the Q6600 used in testing, so for power should we compare Q6600 with IGP to E4500 with GTX 280 (or 9800)? That's certainly one valid comparison point, but if you go that route you quickly get to the stage where you have so many valid points of comparison that the project becomes unmanageable.
Personally, I assume most users understand that this is a look at energy efficiency for a specific task, and not a holistic look at PC power use. What it tells us is that in heavily bottlenecked situations, GPU encoding is far more efficient than CPU encoding. That's useful information. Now we just need a good codec and application to back it up.
Inkjammer - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since this is still a beta version, I have to wonder how much could possibly change by end of release? Were you able to talk to Elemental to address the issues with the beta and the dissapointment in the "advanced" settings?The Pro edition seems dissapointing, but if they ironed out the kinks in the end... I'd be interested in picking it up. Will there be a follow-up review for the release version?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
I've kept Elemental aware of all of the issues I've had. I gave them some suggestions back after my first preview of the software. Every single problem I've encountered Elemental has added to their list of things to QA for, I'm hoping we'll see some significant improvements in the next major release.I will keep an open dialogue with Elemental and definitely look at any significant changes in the future.
Take care,
Anand
GotDiesel - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Oh jeez.. are these guys retarded or what??? baseline only.. wake up guys.. everyone uses HIGH at least level 4.1..this is a typical example of windows software. all GUI and no go..
what we need here is an open source version.. x264 is a perfect example of superior quality software surpassing close source .. now if only you "professionals" could do the same..
michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
given, that most blu-ray content is already a varient of the efficent mp4 (avc,vc-1,x264 etc etc).to compress it just for the shake of saving file space seems foolish.
IMHO, in most cases, the file on the blu-ray has been encoded to give you the best possible picture in that file size. No automagic program is going to somehow make the file size smaller, and maintain the same quality.
Now if converting to a smaller resolution, theres a point, but then data loss is a given.
IMHO, this solution would ideal for a gamer that wants to work with video, since inalot of cases more cores dont make a difference in gaming... yet make sense for data compression, you could have the best of both worlds, buy a higher speed, dual core, and use the money saved on a faster video card....
if only the software worked.
gamerk2 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
They said the same things with the .mpeg (and later. .mp3) formats: Why convert from .WAV and lose data and quality?michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
at least with a wav to mp3, theres a compression coversion.starting with a blu-ray to just run x264 on it.
is like taking and mp3, and converting it to mp3 again, just with more compression.
your stacking detail loss.
JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
True, but at 20-40 GB per BRD even a 1TB HDD runs out of space with only 20-50 movies. A 35 Mbps AVC stream may look "best", but outside of still captures I bet most users wouldn't notice a difference between 35 Mpbs AVC and 20 Mbps AVC... or possibly even 10 to 15 Mbps.michal1980 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
if i'm buying a blu-ray, and paying for that 30-35Mbps. Why would I kill it?it just baffels me.
Lonyo - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since the 9600GT isn't too far off the 8800GT in gaming, but has a large difference in the number of SP's (IIRC), it would be interesting to see how the two compare, rather than looking at even lower end cards like the 9500 and 8600's.Any chance of some additional numbers (even only one benchmark) using the 9600?
Staples - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
From the introMedical imaging and scientific analysis benefitted tremendously from GPU acceleration, but it's rare that you are a gamer with a $400 GPU is going to be searching for oil deposits in his/her spare time on the same machine.
Dobs - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Perhaps you can help me understand what Medical Imaging has to do with searching for oil deposits?Staples - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Or maybe that should be:a typical gamer
Probably the latter.
Doormat - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
"I want a CUDA enabled version of x264"Amen to that. Plus possibly a WPF version of Handbrake to make it look more elegant. I could care less about video preview.
Also, does BadaBoom support reading from ISOs or do I have to mount with DaemonTools?
I have a Q9450 OC'd to 3.2GHz, so I'm pretty happy with my x264 performance. My iPhone movies are usually done in about 3x realtime (90 minute movie in 30 mintues) at 700-900kbit/s, and the PS3/360 movies are done a little bit quicker (since there is no resizing going on, just transcoding).
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Badaboom doesn't support reading from ISOs, you have to mount with DT.-A
Manabu - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
>> "I want a CUDA enabled version of x264"It was already tried: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139158">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139158
Dark Shikari (x264 developer) said:
"Given my experience so far in trying to port the motion search to CUDA, and Avail's hiring of a contractor to attempt to do so, I'd put the quote for porting the whole encoder somewhere on the level of a few million dollars... if you can even find people willing and able to do it."
"GPU encoding has a lot of potential, but it has a lot of weaknesses too. Its a bit like programming for a Cell or an FPGA, except exponentially more of a nightmare."
EvilBob - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
page 6 appears to have the wrong figure - according to the text, it should show energy use information, but the table currently rendering shows the badaboom regular v. pro comparison.sideshow23bob - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Isn't the product name Badaboom maybe a Fifth Element reference considering the company has the name Elemental in its name. Just a guess. If that's the case it's slightly cooler.