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Transcoding in 1/5 the Time with Help from the GPU
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Jason Cross got a lead about a technology ATI is developing called Avivo Transcode that will use ATI graphics cards to cut down the time it takes to transcode video by a factor of five. It's part of the general-purpose computation on GPU movement. The Aviva Transcode software can only work with ATI's latest 1000-series GPUs, and the company is working on profiles that will allow, for example, transcoding DVDs for Sony's PSP."
Maybe others have had this idea. Maybe it's too expensive or just not practical. Imagine using PCI cards with a handful of FPGAs on board to provide reconfigurable heavy number crunching abilities to specific applications. Processes designed to use them will use one or more FPGAs if they are available, else they'll fall back to using the main CPU in "software mode."
This should be written in Shader Language (or whatever it's called these days) which is portable between cards. There's no reason NOT to release this on any platform. Since it only runs on the latest ATI cards it probably uses some feature that nVidia will have in it's next batch of cards as well. If ATI doesn't release it for Linux and the Mac hopefully it won't be that difficult to duplicate their efforts. After all, shader programs are uploaded to the video driver as plain text.... ;)
wow, for once there's a slashdot article i have insight on! (whether it's modded that way remains to be seen.... ;) )
i would actually be shocked if there weren't linux support. the ability to do what they want only need to be in the drivers. i've been doing a gpgpu feasability study as an internship and did an mpi video compressor (based on ffmpeg) in school. using a gpu for compression/transcoding is a project i was thinking of starting once i finally had some free time since it seems built for it. something like 24 instances running at once at a ridiculous amount of flops (puts a lot of cpus to shame, actually). if you have a simd project with 4D or under vectors, this is the way to go.
like i said, it really depends on the drivers. as long as they support some of the latest opengl extensions, you're good to go. languages like Cg and BrookGPU, as well as other shader languages, are cross-platform. they can also be used with directx, but fuck that. i prefer Cg, but ymmv. actually, the project might not be that hard, just needs enought people porting the algorithms to something like Cg.
that said, don't expect this to be great unless your video card is pci-express. the agp bus is heavily asymmetric towards data going out to the gpu. as more people start getting the fatter, more symmetric pipes of pci-e, look for more gpgpu projects to take off.
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Though I am sure you wrote that as a pure joke, this has already been done long ago. During the fierce competion on the demo scene between the ATARI ST and the Amiga, crews were exploiting every speck of power they could from their machine. The ATARI ST being a general purpose machine compared to the Amiga (which had very advanced sound and graphical custom processors), the programmers who wanted to pull off the same graphical effects went as far as using the processor managing the keyboard (a 68xx 8bit motorola chip) for added computational power.