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
While what you say is true to an extent, we're testing the value of a specific piece of hardware to perform certain work. Using your logic, gaming benchmarks are worthless as well, because it's not like you're going to play games all the time.We can look at the power question in a lot of ways. It appears an E4500 would do about just as well as the Q6600 used in testing, so for power should we compare Q6600 with IGP to E4500 with GTX 280 (or 9800)? That's certainly one valid comparison point, but if you go that route you quickly get to the stage where you have so many valid points of comparison that the project becomes unmanageable.
Personally, I assume most users understand that this is a look at energy efficiency for a specific task, and not a holistic look at PC power use. What it tells us is that in heavily bottlenecked situations, GPU encoding is far more efficient than CPU encoding. That's useful information. Now we just need a good codec and application to back it up.
Inkjammer - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since this is still a beta version, I have to wonder how much could possibly change by end of release? Were you able to talk to Elemental to address the issues with the beta and the dissapointment in the "advanced" settings?The Pro edition seems dissapointing, but if they ironed out the kinks in the end... I'd be interested in picking it up. Will there be a follow-up review for the release version?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
I've kept Elemental aware of all of the issues I've had. I gave them some suggestions back after my first preview of the software. Every single problem I've encountered Elemental has added to their list of things to QA for, I'm hoping we'll see some significant improvements in the next major release.I will keep an open dialogue with Elemental and definitely look at any significant changes in the future.
Take care,
Anand
GotDiesel - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Oh jeez.. are these guys retarded or what??? baseline only.. wake up guys.. everyone uses HIGH at least level 4.1..this is a typical example of windows software. all GUI and no go..
what we need here is an open source version.. x264 is a perfect example of superior quality software surpassing close source .. now if only you "professionals" could do the same..
michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
given, that most blu-ray content is already a varient of the efficent mp4 (avc,vc-1,x264 etc etc).to compress it just for the shake of saving file space seems foolish.
IMHO, in most cases, the file on the blu-ray has been encoded to give you the best possible picture in that file size. No automagic program is going to somehow make the file size smaller, and maintain the same quality.
Now if converting to a smaller resolution, theres a point, but then data loss is a given.
IMHO, this solution would ideal for a gamer that wants to work with video, since inalot of cases more cores dont make a difference in gaming... yet make sense for data compression, you could have the best of both worlds, buy a higher speed, dual core, and use the money saved on a faster video card....
if only the software worked.
gamerk2 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
They said the same things with the .mpeg (and later. .mp3) formats: Why convert from .WAV and lose data and quality?michal1980 - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
at least with a wav to mp3, theres a compression coversion.starting with a blu-ray to just run x264 on it.
is like taking and mp3, and converting it to mp3 again, just with more compression.
your stacking detail loss.
JarredWalton - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
True, but at 20-40 GB per BRD even a 1TB HDD runs out of space with only 20-50 movies. A 35 Mbps AVC stream may look "best", but outside of still captures I bet most users wouldn't notice a difference between 35 Mpbs AVC and 20 Mbps AVC... or possibly even 10 to 15 Mbps.michal1980 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
if i'm buying a blu-ray, and paying for that 30-35Mbps. Why would I kill it?it just baffels me.
Lonyo - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
Since the 9600GT isn't too far off the 8800GT in gaming, but has a large difference in the number of SP's (IIRC), it would be interesting to see how the two compare, rather than looking at even lower end cards like the 9500 and 8600's.Any chance of some additional numbers (even only one benchmark) using the 9600?