Accelerate Video Conversion With ATI GPU

Now, this sounded interesting! It turns out that Avivo is not just a video decoder, but an encoder as well. To anybody who frequently does video conversions, and especially to anybody who has an iPod, Palm, PocketPC, or other handheld device, and likes to watch video on-the-go, you should pay serious attention. Again, here’s what ATI says about the Avivo Converter:

ATI’s new Avivo Video Converter is the fast and easy way to transform your videos to play on today’s new breed of portable entertainment devices. The Avivo Video Converter is a “transcoder,” a tool that converts digital video from one file format to another, enabling the same video clip to play on industry standard home DVD/DivX® players, PC’s or portable media devices such as the Apple® iPod®, Sony® portable gaming device, Creative® Zen™ and many others.

The Avivo Video Converter greatly simplifies the process of converting videos from one format to another. A wizard found within Catalyst Control Center enables even a novice user to quickly and easily transcode their videos. Simply select the input file format, the output format and quality level, and file location for the new transcoded video files—the Avivo Video Converter does the rest.

The Avivo Video Converter accepts almost any video file format as a source, and outputs to many different file formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMV, H.264/AVC™*, and more. Compared to conventional conversion file methods, the Avivo Video Converter cuts total transcoding time by up to 80%, making it the new benchmark for high performance transcoding.

	file size software encoding ATI AVIVO 625 MB 8:40 Minutes (2,393 Mbit/s) 2:20 Minutes (LQ), 1,560MBit/s) 2:29 Minutes (MQ 2,732 Mbit/s) 2:35 Minutes(HQ, 3,904 MBit/s) 1,048 MByte 15:16 Minutes (2,393 MBits) 3:11 Minutes (LQ, 1,176 MBit/s) 3:21 Minutes (MQ, 2,502 MBit/s) 3:17 Minutes (HQ, 2,992 MBit/s) 6,047 MByte 116:35 Minutes (2,393 MBits) 43:29 Minutes (LQ, 1,532 MBit/s) 44:02 Minutets (MQ, 2,652 MBit/s) 43:57 Minutes (HQ, 3,096 MBit/s)

This talks about something I do practically on a daily basis. I have a Tapwave Zodiac, which uses the Palm 5 OS, has an ATI Imageon graphics processor, and it plays video beautifully. I play movies ripped from DVD, videos I’ve found on the internet, kids’ TV shows for my little boy, it’s wonderful. But, I have to go through a time-consuming process of converting all this stuff to usable files. The cool thing about Avivo, is that it dramatically cuts down the time it takes to process all this video. It still uses CPU cycles, but gets done in about half the time. Literally. I’m not kidding. I transcoded The Matrix in about 45 minutes to DivX in high quality, while the same job took about 2 hours using my previous favorite method.

You can take practically any video file whether it’s VOB, WMA, MPG, AVI, etc. and change it over to a file in MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX/Xvid), WMA, iPod, or PSP, and others. The directions are simple, but you won’t know the capability is even there unless you go looking for it.

Unfortunately, there are no detailed settings for important parameters like bitrate, resolution, or audio quality. There also is no option to batch encode multiple files at once, or join seperate video files… you’ll have to do all of your pre-editing prior to this conversion. It may be possible to use this with a frame server, so you could hardware-encode files from video editors like Adobe Premiere, but would require some third-party software.

In any case, if you have one of the Radeon X1000 series graphics cards you should absolutely give Avivo a try. It is a fun, practical, and genuine technology that really can revolutionize the way you do video.

Next is a step-by-step process on how to convert a video using ATI’s AVIVO.