AVIVO Video Transcoder
The final feather to CATALYST 5.13's bow will be the inclusion of ATI's AVIVO video transcoder - An application which can be used to convert video to a variety of differing formats. You may already have seen mention of this application around the web, but this driver release will finally see the application hit the public domain.
AVIVO video transcoder supports a wealth of the most commonly used formats, allowing you to convert to or from the following; VCD, SVCD, DivX, WMV 9, H.264, AVI, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. It also has profiles specifically to suit the transcoding of files into formats compatible with the Sony PSP and Apple's iPod, making it a handy tool for anybody with either of those devices. The software is also simplicity itself to use - Choose your input file, pick a profile related to the video format you wish to convert to, tweak the bit rate for the output file as you desire, then hit 'Convert' and the process will begin...
...and end. Very quickly indeed. Because the ATI Video Converter is blisteringly fast - Up to three times faster than the encoding software supplied with Nero Burning ROM, the previous king of the hill. Super-fast encoding, with a good quality output as the result - Not to be sniffed at.
What makes things really interesting is if I tell you a little secret about this application. You're probably assuming it uses the vast power of the Radeon X1800 to convert video so fast, don't you? Well, you'd assume wrong - At present, the AVIVO Video Converter uses entirely software acceleration, GPU acceleration is not present in any shape or form. ATI have managed to create such a well tuned process by leveraging the knowledge and power of their 'Cobra' engine, as used by ATI's Multimedia Center and All-In-Wonder products. This software transcoding ability hasn't gone unnoticed, and ATI are supposedly currently in discussion with several major companies with regard to licensing this software for use in third-party products.
Which brings us to the bad news and, to my mind, this is bad news. Despite the totally software accelerated abilities of AVIVO Video Converter, the software will require you to have a Radeon X1000 series board to make use of it. NVIDIA users are straight out of luck, as you might expect, but what will gall you more is the lack of support for ATI's Radeon Xx00 and 9x00 series of parts - If you want to use this tool, it's an X1000-based board or nothing. ATI's reasoning behind this is that, once they feel that the software acceleration of AVIVO Video Converter is perfected, they will move on to adding hardware acceleration into the mix using the abilities of the Radeon X1000 series. Thus, this would mean either dropping support for non-X1000 based parts at some point in the future anyway, or running development on two different codebases of the software, which ATI are none too keen to do. This seems to be a final decision on ATI's part, so I wouldn't hold out hope of this application working officially on any other boards any time in the future - Trust me, I'm as disappointed as you probably are reading this point, I have to confess to slumping down in my seat a little when it was brought up. The only real positive here is that this transcoder will most likely make it into third party applications, where we can all enjoy its speed and abilities without shelling out on a new ATI GPU.
