Anyone who's tried creating video for portable media players, such as Apple iPods and Sony PSPs, will intrigued to hear of the arrival of ADS Tech's InstantVideo To-Go.
This £80 memory-stick-style gadget is a hardware-accelerated video converter for Windows that's claimed to create MP4 (H.264) video footage up to 15 times faster than a computer - and be the first of its kind available.
More.
They're claiming 5x faster than real-time, so let's say 150fps for NTSC video. My machine can encode a 320x240 h.264 video at 146fps using moderately fast settings.
What were they comparing it to? ...
Was about to ask the same question - very bold statement from themWould be good to see it on a low end laptop vs high end desktop
I've got a number of outstanding queries with the company about the product.Originally Posted by charleski
One of these is exactly what spec of PC the product's encoding time is being compared with.
We'll just put it up against an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700-powered rig and see if it cuts the mustard
Yea, but that aint exactly representative is it?We'll just put it up against an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700-powered rig and see if it cuts the mustard
As much as I hate over inflated advertising claims, it has to be something that is applicable to the average joe. If it is genuinely up to 15x faster on something bought from PC World 3-4 years ago, say 'Up to'. Pitting it against something that is 25-30x what it cost (in complete rig terms) isn't exactly a fair test...
Seems like a product that needs a review form an honest third party before being seriously considered. If it does work it is a cleaver bit of engineering though.
Well, if there's any specific fault, it's mine, cos the press release does say "up to" and the headline of the news piece and the news piece itself do not.Yea, but that aint exactly representative is it?
As much as I hate over inflated advertising claims, it has to be something that is applicable to the average joe. If it is genuinely up to 15x faster on something bought from PC World 3-4 years ago, say 'Up to'. Pitting it against something that is 25-30x what it cost (in complete rig terms) isn't exactly a fair test...
What's interesting (well, you might not agree) is that the original press release got the figures a little mixed up, and actually seriously underplayed the faster-than-PC figure.
Originally, the number for the real-time speed (5x) was the one that was mistakenly used for the faster-than-PC figure, which, of course, has to be (5hrs x (1hr/20m)) ie 15x.
So, it could be I'm doubly to fault - because I spotted that error and got it put right and, so I am told, I was the first person to realise this mistake, despite a version of that release having been issued in the USA a couple of months ago.
So, perhaps best just to shoot the messenger!
I've had a lot of dealings with ADS products and, in the main, they do what it says on the tin.
I own a number of ADS FireWire and FireWire&USB external drive caddies and PCI FireWire cards and have also used ADS analogue<>digital video converter boxes.
That's not intended to be a blanket endorsment for the brand but I'd still be a bit suprised if we found out that it didn't work as described - and we have one on the way, I'm told.
But, it's just that the description is, in my view, not as clear as it needs to be.
Well, the real comparison, surely, is between a middle-of-the-road PC doing it all in software and a middle-of-the-road PC using the ADS to accelerate matters?Was about to ask the same question - very bold statement from them
Okay, it would be interesting if it dumped all over a high-end desktop PC working in software - and hopefully, we'll test that and also test it against file-creation aided by a top-end graphics card.
But the real target for the product, I'd imagine, is to cut down the time it takes to convert video files on any Windows XP PCs that labour over that task.
The time taken to encode video can vary a lot according to the options used, which have an impact on the resulting quality. So any test to compare this to a PC would need to know a few technical details about their encoding process. For instance, the figure I quoted above was using x264 with the 'PD-iPod' configuration in megui. This is Baseline profile, 1-pass ABR, no B-frames, 1 ref frame, 8x8 P macroblocks, Multi hex motion estimation with multi qpel subpixel and deblocking on.
The iPod is quite restricted in terms of what variety of h.264 it'll play back, so everything for it has to be baseline profile, but I could alter the other parameters and slow down encoding quite a lot, while getting an increase in video quality (whether that matters for something you'll view on a tiny iPod screen is another issue).
Yea, sounds good. But then who'd bring the news?So, perhaps best just to shoot the messenger!
I used to work on hardware media encoders so I would be quite interested in exactly which codecs is supports and how much hardware accelaration it offers.
Chances are, the hardware accelarates stuff like motion vector searchs and DCT encoding, and the software uses that to create videos of the approprate format. From the list of codecs supported it should be possible to get an idea of what the hardware accelaration supports.
Of course if there are linux drivers or an open API, so much the better.
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