I've been following the Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream situation for a little while now.
The promise of a GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) for all sorts of number crunching is a great idea. But I don't really give a toss about that, I'm interested in whether it can make my video encoding go any faster!
Some time ago I read an article about how the use of CUDA was going to make H.264 video encoding loads faster on even basic PCs, but from the complete lack of news about it since then I'm led to understand that didn't happen.
There are of course various bits of software that supposedly do use CUDA to speed up encoding/transcoding (e.g. Badaboom), but the quality of encodes is still an issue.
Now that I've finished encoding my DVD library into digital formats it's become much less of an issue, but going forward I'd love to see a proper hardware solution - that can encode at decent resolutions with acceptable quality. If anyone's used one and has suggestions, let me know.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Three-dee at home...
With all the fuss that surrounded the release of Avatar at the cinema (ok it was a while ago, just haven't got around to posting) 3D movies have hit the mainstream again (the first mainstream event being the awesome Jaws 3D).
Most of the TV manufacturers are now getting in on the '3D at home' action with what seems to be varied reactions.
People seem quite happy to go to the cinema and wear odd glasses in an effort to make what they see seem more realistic, but do they really want the same experience at home? I personally think the 3D experience tends to work well with screens that are huge (like we find in most cinemas). So screens that are 32/37/40/42 or even 50 inches in size probably won't work so well. Of course I'm yet to see one in action, but I can't imagine it looking that great that I'm desperate to run out and get one.
I am of course holding out on buying a new TV (just in case they are deemed to be that great)...but I'll be happily proved right eventually.
Most of the TV manufacturers are now getting in on the '3D at home' action with what seems to be varied reactions.
People seem quite happy to go to the cinema and wear odd glasses in an effort to make what they see seem more realistic, but do they really want the same experience at home? I personally think the 3D experience tends to work well with screens that are huge (like we find in most cinemas). So screens that are 32/37/40/42 or even 50 inches in size probably won't work so well. Of course I'm yet to see one in action, but I can't imagine it looking that great that I'm desperate to run out and get one.
I am of course holding out on buying a new TV (just in case they are deemed to be that great)...but I'll be happily proved right eventually.
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