Monday, April 17, 2006
ATI Catalyst 6.4 Windows Media Center Edition Video Conversion Utility...Not
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 01:43 PM
"Catalyst 6.4 introduces a Windows MCE Video Conversion utility. This utility allows users to convert video content that is recorded by MCE, or video content that is available to MCE, to variety of different formats. The video content can be converted to MPEG-2, MPEG-4 SP, MPEG-4 AVC and Windows Media. iPod Video and PSP video are listed as separate formats for easy recognition...For unknown reasons, ATI has removed all references to there Windows Media Center Edition Video Conversion Utility. A cached version of the Release Notes can be viewed through Google."
Looks like ATI let something slip before they were ready, or they pulled the video conversion utility from the shipping drivers at the last moment. Either way, this is some compelling stuff. ATI has an Avivo page that talks about the video converter, and it looks impressive. It claims to convert video files 80% faster than the competition, but it seems to be 80% only for H.264. This is likely because the supported cards have H.264 hardware encoding/decoding support. That's a big step towards unshackling the computer's CPU from being the limiting factor in video transcoding. It does't matter how fast a CPU I have, video transcoding never seems to be quick enough. I wonder if any of that ATI hardware speeds up WMV or Divx encoding?
Looks like ATI let something slip before they were ready, or they pulled the video conversion utility from the shipping drivers at the last moment. Either way, this is some compelling stuff. ATI has an Avivo page that talks about the video converter, and it looks impressive. It claims to convert video files 80% faster than the competition, but it seems to be 80% only for H.264. This is likely because the supported cards have H.264 hardware encoding/decoding support. That's a big step towards unshackling the computer's CPU from being the limiting factor in video transcoding. It does't matter how fast a CPU I have, video transcoding never seems to be quick enough. I wonder if any of that ATI hardware speeds up WMV or Divx encoding?
