Fidelis K said:What does the Avivo setting in the catalyst control center actually do? If
I change the setting, will it change the way, say, Media Player plays back
various video clips?
Ken Maltby said:Where are you seeing this setting? Describe how you
get to it?
Fidelis K said:How can you not see it in the CCC?
All I see, in the Basic menu, is the "button" to launch the
Converter. I don't recall any real "setting" for Avivo, in
CCC, at all.
Hertz_Donut said:Avivo Only works with cards above 1xxx, i.e. 1300, 1600, 1900, etc. It
will not work with x800, 9700, 9600, etc.
That is why you cannot see it...your ATI card cannot support it and you
will not see it in CCC. You obviously have not been to the ATI update
page in a long, long time...Avivio has been there for download for a
Loooooong time, along with the list of cards that are compatible.
Honu
Fidelis said:What does the Avivo setting in the catalyst control center
actually
do? If I change the setting, will it change the way, say,
Media
Player plays back various video clips?
If you were to use GraphEdit and access the property pages,Bill's News said:I prefer to use "Let the app ..." where that is available. I have enabled
pull-down detection, tho. But I've not dabbled with the controls
sufficiently as to say they do or do not make much of a difference.
BTW, I'm using the x1300 (near, or at, the bottom of ATI's xpile) and only
got that to experiment with the Avivo converter - not entirely a waste of
time but also not ready for prime time; it's more like a toy actually!
When a non-PC neighbor asks to borrow a TV capture I might have made, I
can use the converter to produce an MPEG2 DVD compliant file from my 12
mbps MPEG2 captures. However, this process is only marginally faster than
other software I already own - and not fast enough to suggest to me that
the GPU is employed. Likewise, it does not support "squeezing" to values
between 8 and 12 mbps, for those captures which are just a hair above 4.7
gigadecimals.
Ken said:If you were to use GraphEdit and access the property pages,
as I have suggested, you would find that for MPEG-DVD you
can set the average bit rate from 1.000mbps to 15.000mbps.
You can also set the VBR, Peak bitrate in the same range. If
you use the generic MPEG-2 standard you can set them from:
500.0kbps to 20.000mbps.
It does not use the GPU, at all, not with any cards.
If it is taking more than 10min to transcode a 42min TV
capture
you must have something set wrong or some other issue slowing
the process.
It is still a toy because ATI doesn't support or improve on
it's
current ability to apply quality improvements at the cost of
some
speed. There could be the perfect compromise, but I just
haven't
found it.
Luck;
Ken
Bill's News said:Thanks Ken, I had used GraphEdit for the Xvid-like, and h264-like
conversions (both of which proved unsatisfactory, as you already know).
Yes, I recall now having seen the settings for MPEG2 DVD, but in
abandoning the one project I simply forgot about the other.
My mpeg4-ish conversions were in the order of 9 minutes - even when the
source and target were on USB2 drives. The conversions to MPEG2 DVD (via
the Avivo converter), so far I've done two, were in the order of 16
minutes - tho the estimated time to complete vacillates so wildly I may
not have noticed the actual time at completion.
I only assumed that the GPU was employed on the faster conversions because
the CPU overhead is lighter than pass one of xvid conversions via
conventional programs - VDub-MPEG2 for example. I didn't bother to
monitor the MPEG2 process via Avivo, my objective was merely to produce a
DVD and it did so a tad quicker than software for which I paid separately.
Presently, I'm still doing xvid via FlaskMPEG. Quite surprisingly this
process utilizes the 2gHz AMD64-x2 by 512 (both core processors hitting
60% or more) much better than VDub (which predominantly utilizes one core)
and my pass one conversions are running near 70 to 110 frames per second,
while pass two is 40ish or 25ish depending upon whether I enable B frame
VHQ. This is a significant increase over the 2gp4-512 which I had
previously used to process these files - those typically consuming 3x or
much more of play time - and is nearly twice as fast a VDub. This did not
reveal itself on the older CPU as the programs were CPU bound.
Using the widest search parameters, pass two drops to a mere 15 fps on the
current equipment - but the result is spectacular.
If ATI ever gets serious about Avivo conversion, I'll try it again -
because some day I might need h264.
Oh BTW, my CPU utilization figures are influenced by the fact that this PC
I bought to experiment with Avivo has but one internal drive and the other
drives are USB2 - so it's natural to be i/o bound on some of these
processes.
<snip>I'm doing a transcode to AVC/H.264 using TMPGEnc 4.0
XPress as I type this and both my CPUs are in the high 90s.
Oops, they just dropped to the high 80s, I'm about 10% into
the analyzing phase. Of course this is viewing Windows Task
Manager, so it includes everything running. System Idle is
running between 10 and 20%. So any other processing like
running OE and typing this, is having no significant impact.
Basically, it seems to use whatever resources it can, and
just
takes longer if fewer resources are available. XP seems to be
sharing well, across both cores. Maybe there will be a
different result in the 2nd pass/writing phase.
It's now in the outputting file stage, and back up into the
high
90s.
Actually that's not completely true. The individual DirectShow
filters that make up the converter will work with any card. I use
both the hacked and official versions on my x850, without the
CCC. And the official version on my x1600 pro for my HTPC,
with the CCC.
Yer Welcome said:I've d/l'd the hacked version to maybe use with my 9250 dualhead AGP card
Would the avivo directshow filters improve performance of DVD video
playback using powerdvd - windvd - Videolan player ?
Bill's News said:Ken Maltby wrote:
<snip>
It's apparent that these processors now have the horses for video
processing and that both your video processes and mine are i/o bound.
Since I'm always using at least one USB2 drive, I'm likely more i/o bound
than you are. On the other hand, it's quite comfortable now to do capture
and conversion simultaneously with email and browsing! Beside which this
2g AMD64-x2 @ 1 gig ram, is much less costly to purchase and operate than
the 6 year old 2gp4-512 it replaced - which always converted at 100% CPU,
clearly processor bound. At this moment I'm writing collected xvid
conversions to DVD while converting another, along with email and queue
shuffling at Netflix. The laptop I once used, to ease the load on the old
processor, sits idle in the other room.