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THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLH
.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video-
compression standard that enables
high-quality video at very low bitrates
(substantially lower than MPEG-2). At the
risk of gross over-simplifi cation, the codec
compresses video by dividing each frame into
a matrix of blocks, analyzing each block, and
discarding any redundant information.
Decoding H.264 video is a relatively
light task, computationally speaking; in fact,
decoding low-resolution H.264 video can be
performed on a device as simple as an iPod.
Encoding video using H.264, on the other hand,
is computationally intense. Nvidia and AMD’s
ATI division are making the case that their
GPUs are just the ticket for H.264 encoding—
all that’s needed is some clever soft ware.
Industry analyst Jon Peddie agrees—to an
extent. “When the GPU is used, it’s mostly used
for transcoding; e.g., getting from MPEG-2 to
H.264. You can do that on a CPU, but it takes
a long time; the GPU is about 5 to 10 times
faster.” Elemental Technologies is working on
two soft ware products that will run on Nvidia’s
CUDA-compatible GeForce architecture: the
RapiHD Accelerator for commercial encoding
applications (a plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro)
and Badaboom, for consumers interested in
transcoding video. Although neither product
was shipping at press time, Elemental had
released a public beta version of Badaboom. “It
defi nitely shows the future,” Peddie said of the
soft ware. “It’s still early in its development, the
UI needs work, and there are some additional
features they will add, but it’s fun to play with.”
AMD, meanwhile, is working on its own
encoding solutions. “We’ve been studying
how to best merge CPU and GPU processing
into a cohesive solution,” said AMD
spokesperson Jay Marsden. AMD’s
Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
technology will tap the power of the
company’s new Radeon 4800 series GPUs to
transcode 1080p video files to H.264 andMPEG-2 at 1.8 times real time. The transcod-
ing software will initially be incorporated
into Cyberlink’s PowerDirector consumer
video-editing software. AMD is also
working on a professional-quality H.
encoder that will come in the form of a
plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro.
The fabless semiconductor manufacturer
Ambric is taking a wholly different
approach to H.264 encoding. The company
recently developed a reference-design
H.264 encoder based on its Am2000 chip,
which is a massively parallel processor
array (MPPA) consisting of 336 32-bit RISC
(reduced instruction set computing)
processors. The Am2000 differs from AMD’s
and Nvidia’s GPUs in that it is based on a
MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data)
architecture compared to the SIMD (single
instruction, multiple data) architecturecurrent GPUs are based on.
While a SIMD chip can support one or a
few instruction streams, each processor in a
MIMD chip can be operating on a different
instruction stream simultaneously, with
each processor able to access a dedicated
area of memory. The processors can pass
work to one another via a reconfigurable in-
terconnect. But you shouldn’t expect to find
the Am2000 in a consumer product anytime
soon. Pyro AV’s new Pyro Kompressor HD,
a hardware/software combo that includes
a PCI Express card based on Ambric’s refer-
ence design, sells for $3,495.
And then there’s Intel. Jon Peddie expects
the chip giant to compete aggressively in the
H.264-encoding space when the company ships
Larrabee. “Larrabee doesn’t have anything spe-
cial for encoding,” said Peddie “but it can throw a
bunch of processors at the problem.”Elemental Technologies’ consumer-oriented Badaboom media converter harnesses the power of
Nvidia’s CUDA-compatible GPUs to transcodes video to H.264.THE NEWS
A killer app for the general-purpose GPU, or does this task call for
something more specialized? —MICHAEL BROWN
The Rise of H.264 Video
THE NEWS
The Rise of H.264 Video
THE NEWS
Encoders
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