GPU accelerated AVC encoding?

[tomos]

tried AVIVO in the past and it was never anything but poop.

tried cyberlinks espresso thing and it's the same. GPU usage on my 5770 goes to 18% but the output is carp. nowhere near what x264 gives me (not a lot of help in that it doesn't deinterlace properly and won't accept AVS scripts - not to mention that you can't choose any options at all).

i was encoding a load of home movies over the last 3-4 years off a sony HD cam so obv took a while and hoped something out there exists to speed it up a notch. even if the speed-up was nowhere near the 10x increase and only doubled it (only - heh!)

[LoRd_MuldeR]

We are yet to see a GPUGU encoder that can beat x264 speed-wise while retaining equitable quality. This has been discussed a lot

[tomos]

i haven't seen one that's even worth looking into yet. i'm reading a few threads now but doesn't seem good

if the x264 crowd get onto this boat then maybe ..

[deekey777]

The AVIVO transcoder produces crap. Crap-crap. But it works. To see it, just download the MediaShow Espresso Trial, which uses ATi's GPU-Encoder for H.264 and MPEG2.

[tomos]

tried espresso (as per my OP) and it's poop. what i don't get is, isnt is possible to just offload small things (assuming vid encoding can be broken down that much) onto the GPU instead of what they are doing now which produces nothing but crappy videos? small steps.

[cogman]

Originally Posted by tomos

tried espresso (as per my OP) and it's poop. what i don't get is, isnt is possible to just offload small things (assuming vid encoding can be broken down that much) onto the GPU instead of what they are doing now which produces nothing but crappy videos? small steps.

Small things aren't worth it, In fact, you'll get much slower speeds if you offload just little pieces to the GPU. It takes a fair bit of time just to get the code to the GPU to run, and allocate the memory for it as well. Then it takes a fair amount of time to get the code off of the GPU. If you are doing this with small functions, you are going to have a world of hurt when it comes to encoding speeds.

Computationally intense things are what need to be offloaded. However, computationally intense things have been hand optimized up to wazoo by the x264 team. It wouldn't be a simple case of "Copy this code and make it run on the GPU"

[expresspotato]

Yes I'm also looking for a way to get ffmpeg & x264 working nicely on a GPU assisted encode.

[kemuri-_9]

to my knowledge,
every attempt at offloading any portion of x264 onto a GPU for processing has lead the person trying
A) disappear like a puff of smoke, or
B) admitting defeat at it being not worth it

[Biggiesized]

The only point I could see in GPU offloading is maybe for offlining content.

[tomos]

here's hoping something happens to make use of all that grunt in GPUs