ATI Avivo XCode Video Encoder Software - In Development

CHIP Online had the opportunity to test a beta version of ATI’s still secret „Avivo XCode“ encoding tool. It uses the power of the GPU to reduce video encoding time –into virtually any format – drastically. Their results show: The new ATI solution easily does it 5 times faster than even the fastest CPUs available today!

Traditional video encoding tools rely solely on the PC’s main processor for the extensive calculations necessary when en- and decoding video sequences. The secret ATI Avivo XCode tool, however, additionally employs the power of ATI’s X1000 series’ architecture. They assume that the XCode tool mainly utilizes the programmable pixel shader units for it’s number-crunching.

There’s a hook however: Avivo XCode only runs on PCs with ATIs Radeon X1000 series VGA cards; i.e. X1300, X1600, X1800 in their respective Pro or XT versions, as well as their All-in-Wonder version. The tests indicate that even the cheapest model, a Radeon X1300 available for around 90 Euros in Europe, can achieve dramatic speed increases at crunching down videos.

For comparative benchmark results, the test configuration had to transcode two different MPEG-2 clips into the WMV9 format, using Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder (WME) and ATIs Avivo Xcode, respectively. For WME we chose the options „File download“, „DVD quality (CBR)“ and „High definition quality audio (CBR)“. Since the beta version of Avivo’s XCode doesn’t offer any detailed settings, they let the tool convert the test clips into the output quality levels „High“, „Medium“ and „Low“. You can find the rest of the test specifications below.

The results are (to say the least) impressive: The Avivo XCode beta transcoded the video clips about five times faster than Microsoft’s encoder (!), with the chosen quality level showing no significant impact: Comparing the picture quality, clarity and smoothness of the converted clips, even our codec specialists couldn’t identify any visual difference.

Remarkable: During the encoding process, XCode uses the main CPU to its maximum – the task manager continually shows 100 percent usage. In contrast, the Windows Media Encoder (who’s supposed to use only the CPU) shows fluctuations from 75 to 100 percent.

Video codec support

Avivo XCode beta supports 11 video codecs/profiles: MPEG 1/2, VCD, S-VCD, DVD, MPEG 4 (DivX Compatible), WMV9, Portable Media Center, H.264 (AVI), MPEG-4 (Sony PSP Compatible Video) and H.264 (MP4 Apple iPod Compatible Video). So Avivo XCode is suitable for PSP and iPod Video fans as well as owners of modern cellphones - they support the H.264/3GPcodec, too.

Limitations

The Avivo Xcode version in their possession offers no detailed settings for important parameters like bitrate, resolution or audio quality. It’s also not possible to join separate video files. Hopefully, ATI will add these features before the final release of the tool.

Conclusion

It’s more than impressive to experience a first glimpse of what the Avivo architecture in ATI’s X1000 series is capable of. At everything video-encoding, even (extremely expensive) high-end CPUs will soon suffer a staggering defeat by even the cheapest entry-level VGA cards.

If the soon-to-be-published final version of Avivo’s XCode contains the features we specified above, video-enthusiasts will without any doubt suddenly find ATI X1000 series extremely appealing…