Well, this blog, with several news a day clocked visitor #50.000 on the day when the team layed a ground foundation for a new website. The domain is registered, we selected hosting provider in the US and now it is up to programmers to make the site come to life (we already have alpha code up). At launch, you’ll be welcomed with articles written by experienced journalists located all around the world. I hope this new project with justify your trust just like this first 50K did on this blog. 

The quotes from articles published on this blog ended up in promotional documents from companies such as AMD, Elemental Technologies, Akasa, Nvidia, OtterBox and many others… well, moving on to the next milestone. Thank you for reading.

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• Vista CUDA driver improvements
• better AMD CPU code optimization on our side

With quad-core, even if clocked much lower, there should be less load since Badaboom is truly multi-threaded application that can take advantage of more cores than you can have in your system (unless your home system has 16 cores :-).
As you can see, guys are really trying to fix as much issues as they appear, and note that AVCHD transcoding should be awesome, since they pushed a lot of work in that department during development of their other product, RapiHD.
My advice is that you download the trial version and send your feedback to the guys – they only have limited amount of various hardware, and it would be of great use for them if you find something weird that they could fix ASAP.

The post Badaboom’s CPU utilization issue explained appeared first on VR World.

Features

You can go the easy way of clicking... or just go to advanced options

This is a consumer friendly product, so hardcore users might object to “too fancy” interface. Personally, I have nothing against. Supported input video formats are .m2v, .mpg, .vob, .avi*, .trp, .ts, .m2t, .m2ts, .mpeg, .mts (MPEG-2, H.264, RAW, HDV, AVCHD, AC-3, MP2, PCM) in any resolution lower than full HD one. Output is being done in MP4 (H.264) profile with 2-channel AAC-LC audio, in any resolution below 720p one.

Setting up the custom resolution is "easy peasy"... for some reason, default after installation was resolution of my BBerry Bold

Since primary purpose of this application is to transcode video to your iPod, iPhone, PSP, MCE and other handheld devices. I’ve just got a Blackberry 9000 Bold, and it fits the reccomended PSP resolution perfectly (480×272). Of course, you have a choice of custom resolutions, audio settings, bit rate and so on. Bit rate is especially helpfull in order to get the movie fit on your mobile device – after some hacking, 8GB card on my Blackberry Bold had all three LOTRs for upcoming flight Zagreb-Munich-San Francisco. It may be 13 hours, but it will be more fun with Blackberry on

Audio Settings depend on the audio source featured on your DVD or video file...

Of course, writing this opinion while listening to Sex and The City on right monitor wasn’t helpful, but still my friends and myself were impressed with the speed of selecting the transcode options. Finally a no-brainer user interface which you can work with at 2AM.

Performance is a charm, but comes at a price…
So, what kind of performance can you expect from Badaboom? I’ve tried the software using AMD Athlon 64 5000BE @3GHz, Phenom 9950BE@2.6 GHz, Zotac’s GeForce 8800GTX AMP! Edition (so, higher clocked than 8800Ultra) and Nvidia’s reference GeForce GTX 280. Given the time constraints, I didn’t find the time to put slower cards such as 8600GTS and similar castrated brothers. For a video card minimum, Elemental reccomends GeForce 8800GT or 9600GSO (a brilliant card, don’t be surprised if Nvidia kills it).

Dual-core CPU is tricky area for Badaboom - you should think about quad-core that wil be able to feed the GPU

My experience was the following – Phenom system with 8800GTX beat the living crap out of Athlon system with GTX280. 8800GTX was transcoding my test Lord of The Rings – FoTR at 184-195 fps, and was done in 14 minutes. Dual-core Athlon with GTX280 achieved only 145 fps on average, with the CPU load at 88-94%. Badaboom was eating 60-70% of Athlon system, while quad-core was loaded at 60%. So for Badaboom, you need a triple or a quaddie CPU.

But the performance is awesome. When I compare a 14 minute transcode to whole-nighter on CPU alone, it is just… let’s just say that this product rocks. In order to bypass stupid MPAAfia protection on my DVDs (I have more than 200 DVDs and 300 games for which I paid for, and MPAA and game developers/publishers still treat me like a criminal. Great moves, guys – I’ll crack my original games before you say “torrent”!), I’ve used AnyDVD. This piece of software is something that every owner of DVDs should buy. Removing the protection on the fly is something… well, user friendly.

Getting back to Badaboom, from this first look I can say that it is a must buy if you want to transcode movies, and own a GeForce card, this piece of software is something that you should buy. Nvidia is expanding its GPGPU (or GPU computing, as Jensen likes to call it) offering dramatically. First schorching Folding@home performance, then Photoshop and Premiere Pro, and now Badaboom.

I got a review copy for free. But yes, I am going to spend $30 to support the guys.

UPDATE 15:41 CET 24/10/2008: I’ve just filed new story regarding the CPU utilization. You can read it here.

The post UPDATED: Elemental’s video transcoder rocks the world appeared first on VR World.

RapiHD... only for Quadro CS... CX. Darn shame...

As team of users of Sony 1080p and RED One (4K FTW!) camera, my guys expected that RapiHD will be a brilliant add-on to my configuration consisted out of two 4-core Intel Xeons@3 GHz, brilliant ASUS Skulltrail-lite motherboard and Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 SDI. SDI is a paramount when working with HD signal and RED camera, since it tremendously speeds up the workflow. I am first to admit that I am not exactly at home with video production per se, but I well know what to do to make things work, and make them work fast. And now, here comes RapiHD. I wrote about this plug-in couple of times on TG Daily, and saw the funny side of 32-bit limitation when it came to testing on Quadro FX 5800 on 32-bit OS (FX5800 has 4GB of RAM, thus performance sucked unless you would reg-hack the card down to 2GB or upgrade to 64-bit OS).

The CS4 launch came and went, and RapiHD site got the links to Quadro CX product web-page. So, what happened? Well, Nvidia has exclusive bundling deal for RapiHD and the company decided to bundle that pack exclusively with Quadro CX. I spoke with Elemental Technologies Sam Blackman and he told me that Adobe certified Nvidia Quadro CX and that is the preferred solution for Adobe CS4. Alarms went in my head like no tomorrow, since Quadro CSCX comes with quite an interesting set of specs. Of course, I reserve the right to be proven wrong if Quadro CX has some special juice inside. But I see a cut-down GT200 chip with 192 processors, 384-bit memory controller and 1.5 GB of video memory. In essence, we’re talking about this:

“Old” GTX260 GPU – 64-bit memory controller lane + higher density GDDR3 = Quadro CX.

So yes, compatibility with 32-bit OS is a given here, but shouldn’t you tell to video production industry – “please migrate to 64-bit, things are rosy there?” Everybody and his uncle know that Hollywood listened and now FX is better than ever (BTW, full-scale models in Battlestar Galactica are rendered on AMD Opteron machine with Quadro FX inside – no render machine mumbo jumbo – and that was made possible with a 64-bit OS and 16GB of memory). Guys, please, put RapiHD as an option or a bundle on SDI add-on card as well, since the most powerful and wanted solution for movie producers would be Quadro FX 5800 plus SDI add-on card. That’s my opinion – my two cents, of course.

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