Slashdot Mirror
The Wretched State of GPU Transcoding
MrSeb writes "This story began as an investigation into why Cyberlink's Media Espresso software produced video files of wildly varying quality and size depending on which GPU was used for the task. It then expanded into a comparison of several alternate solutions. Our goal was to find a program that would encode at a reasonably high quality level (~1GB per hour was the target) and require a minimal level of expertise from the user. The conclusion, after weeks of work and going blind staring at enlarged images, is that the state of 'consumer' GPU transcoding is still a long, long way from prime time use. In short, it's simply not worth using the GPU to accelerate your video transcodes; it's much better to simply use Handbrake, which uses your CPU."
...since the results of OpenCL code is static across GPUs rather than being an arbitrary output.
Fuzzy,
You pretty much nailed my problem with the output. :P That's the reason why Arcsoft, with compatibility problems, ultimately ranked above Cyberlink. Arcsoft doesn't do very good work on the Radeon 7950 and it can't handle CUDA, but it at least gets something right. Quick Sync video is very good.
Cyberlink got nothing right anywhere. And it's the program most-often recommended to reviewers as a benchmark when we want to review GPU encoding.