Badaboom: A Full Test of Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcoder
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 18, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Application
Badaboom relies on its interface to be one of its biggest strengths, and admittedly it does look very good. On the left you have your sources: optical drive(s), a VIDEO_TS folder from a ripped DVD or a file. In the middle you’ve got a preview of the video itself and on the right you have your output formats with presets for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Classic, Apple TV, Xbox 360 and PS3. Choose your source, choose your output and hit start - that’s all you really need to do.
DVD support is a bit more elegant than your run of the mill video files. You can choose to transcode individual titles or chapters from the DVD, but do keep in mind that Badaboom won't perform any decryption for you - you'll have to break any security on your own.
The standard version of Badaboom will let you use any of these presets but you can’t adjust things like resolution, the pro version gives you an advanced button that let’s you configure a bit more. The configurable options are limited to resolution, bitrate, audio, 3:2 detect and deinterlacing. You can’t even specify the name or location of the output file, although thankfully you can cancel a transcode in the middle of it.
During a transcode you get a small preview of the video in the center of the application and an instantaneous frame rate as well as estimated time. There’s no summary window after the transcode has completed indicating average frame rate, total completion time or other vitals about the process.
In a nutshell, that’s the application - it transcodes things and doesn’t let you adjust much. Which brings us to its limitations...
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JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Wait... did you just talk about clean code and Cyberlink with a straight face!? I think every new version of PowerDVD gets worse, and I've had way too many difficulties with Blu-ray playback and their software (especially the OEM bundled version). Still, maybe they'll get it right with the ATI transcoding. And maybe I'll win the lottery.... :-)prodystopian - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Mike Lowry: ...It's a Limited Edition.Marcus Burnett: You d*mn right it's limited. No cup holder, no back seat...
Yes, I registered to post this.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
ahh, I love that movie. Too bad the sequel was such a letdown.10 points to you my friend :)
-A
Manabu - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
You used too slow profiles. Acording to the handbrake site (http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets)">http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets), the Blind profile should be 4 times faster than the iPhone profile used here. Then, an quadcore leaves the GTX 280 smoking behind. The quality should be then comparable.Further discussion of this new encoder, inclusive by x264 developers: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136847
mongoosesRawesome - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Anand compares an x264 setting that is higher quality than badaboom's. He should have stopped right there, but instead he publishes numbers that show that badaboom is faster.You can't compare speeds if they aren't of similar quality!
thebackwash - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
I must admit I never understood the consumer desire for anything more than reasonable multimedia encoding times. If I buy a new movie, and want to rip it to my computer, I only have to do it *once.* To some, any speedup they can get is well worth the price, but I honestly don't care how long it takes, as long as it's less than, say overnight, or even overnight plus whatever extra time it needs until I get home from work the next day.I understand the desire for faster computation of tasks that involve a lot of user interaction: games, web browsing, office applications, and basically the whole lot of interactive GUI-driven programs, but I never saw the draw of blazingly fast set-it-and-forget-it type computations. I can leave the computer on overnight to perform a task if need be. I personally care about quality, and whether the file can be played back in real time on the target platform. File size is important, too, but with 1TB hard drives coming in at about $125, that has started to matter a lot less.
While I *do* understand why this could provide enormous benefit to professionals working with video, any consumer of DVD movies or amateur videographer should be more than happy with what we have now. I don't see the outcry for faster word processors, and that's because computers perform that function well enough to be usable by consumers or amateurs for whom time is *not* money when it comes to using their computers.
I must admit though, I can take a chill pill and leave the computer for days at a time, as long as my RSS reader catches the daily web updates, so I might not be the average reader of tech sites.
(Once it took my old iBook *ten* days to compile KDE 3.5 from source!)
icrf - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Well, transcoding to a master high quality copy for long term storage, maybe. But when you want to take those with you on a portable device, you have to transcode. I'm not a fan of having multiple copies of things, despite the cost of hard drives, so I'd much rather a way to speedily convert that for me.My problem is I want to convert in bulk, which means either a nice job manager in your GUI, or a documented CLI for the app.
LTG - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Does it support 2-pass encoding?Does it encode uncompressed AVI?
Did they say if Main profile is coming, or if it's stuck like that?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
There are no options to control the number of passes the encoder does, this is simply a single-pass transcode that can happen in greater than real time depending on your GPU.Depending on the format of the video stream it may be able to support it.
Elemental is considering adding Main profile support to Badaboom, but right now it's reserved for the Premier plugin.
-A
erikejw - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Good article otherwise.If you gonna sit all day and code 100 movies or whatever this is the appropriate way to calculate energy consumption.
If not you have to include the extra seconds when your computer sit idle and the cpu transcode finishes.
This is how they do when they calculate server energy consumptin.
It is not like the computer instantly go down to 0 w when the coding is done.