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ATi vs. nVIDIA: Video Transcoding |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Wednesday, 24 December 2008 |
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Page 1 of 5  Encoding of video material is one of those tasks that demand a lot of processing power and till now we had to use, in most cases, CPU processing power. Since market of portable devices that can play video files (like smartphones and portable media players) is growing rapidly, necessity for conversion of video files to lower resolutions and bit rates is growing accordingly. Of course there are cases when we need to covert video file to higher resolution as in case of converting DVD to HD video format that is better suited for your new Full HD TV. Users are using Video Converters more and more every day and at the same time they are seeking for software solution that will do the job faster and with better results.
nVIDIA
Since graphics cards got Stream Processors, nVIDIA got an idea that those SPs can be used for something else except for processing graphics elements. As consequence of that idea we got CUDA – programming language that is base for many applications. One of those applications is Badaboom and its only purpose is transcoding of video material. This is very advanced application and as direct consequence comes the price tag attached to it. There is trial demo version that will allow you to encode 30 files. If you want to encode more than that you must buy full version. We wanted to know how fast Badaboom is, and is it worth 30 bucks, so we downloaded trial version and starter transcoding tests.
 badaboom DVD Start
After we started application we got nicely designed graphical interface that looks like most modern commercial applications. Badaboom looks very “professional” and you don’t need to be a nuclear scientist to use it. Application is very intuitive and you will easily do everything that you intended to, even if you never had any contact with this type of applications. Basically you need to choose video file for trancoding, location where you want transcoded (converted) file to be placed, and of course rate of compression/expansion for sound and video (resolution). There are predefined profiles for popular multimedia devices: Sony PlayStation 3, Sony PlayStation Portable, iPhone/iPod Video, iPod Classic and etc.
 badaboom DVD Settings
In case you are converting DVD, all you need to do is point Badaboom at TS Video folder and it will select all files that need to be converted. After that, all you need to do is choose resolution of converted file. We didn’t like small amount of supported formats since this is commercial application. Still, this is “fresh” application (version 1.1) so we can expect that list of supported formats will get bigger in the near future.
On the other side we don’t have any complaints on speed of video conversion. Everything happens fast and smooth. For video conversion Badaboom uses GPU on your nVIDIA graphics card but your CPU will also be included in that job. On our Q6600 CPU, overclocked on 3.45 GHz, CPU usage went above 22-24%. DVD movie was converted in iPod format (320x240, 640kbps) for eight and a half minutes. This same job our CPU (without help from GPU) did for considerable longer time period. We also tested Badaboom with conversion to 1080p video format and it was done, also, very fast.
badaboom DVD Load
badaboom DVD Encoding Time
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