Badaboom: A Full Test of Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcoder

Final Words

I hate to be so negative about a product like Badaboom because it holds so much potential, unfortunately it just left me disappointed. There’s no way to set custom resolutions, there’s a 5Mbps bitrate cap, there’s no support for Main/High H.264 profiles, there’s no support for Dolby Digital/DTS audio, you can't convert Blu-ray movies, DivX support is flaky at best and there are output issues with some DVD titles.

For the first GPU-accelerated video transcoding application written in CUDA I expected much more from Badaboom. A simple user interface is great, but it lacks the power and customization behind it. NVIDIA has a year before Larrabee hits and you can be sure that Intel will leverage its relationships with the major codec developers (DivX anyone?) to ensure that there’s full Larrabee support right away.

The performance expectations are also interesting. Just as the 8800 GT is pretty much the minimum requirement for decent, speedy gaming in the latest titles, that ends up being the minimum requirement for solid transcoding performance. The GeForce 9500 GT and slower are only really upgrades if you have a slow dual-core CPU, the quad-core offerings are faster than any of NVIDIA's lower end GPUs. The 8800 GT, 9800 GTX and GTX 200 class of products all offer somewhere in the 2 - 4x range of a performance improvement over Intel's quad-core CPUs. While eight-core Nehalems will help close that gap, it's clear that GPUs are much more energy efficient for video transcoding.

NVIDIA needs to do more with companies like Elemental to make sure that launches like this don’t happen. Badaboom held so much promise but disappoints as it is nothing more than a quick way of getting some videos onto your MP3 player or game console without terrible concern for quality or features.

It takes users 10 - 30 hours to transcode an entire Blu-ray movie at the best quality settings on some of the fastest Intel CPUs, that’s where we need GPU acceleration. Target the top and trickle down to address the rest of the market, it’s the NVIDIA approach and it’s one that Elemental doesn’t embrace with Badaboom. This application is reasonable, at best, for the mainstream and does nothing for those serious about transcoding video.

Fix the compatibility problems, fix the crashes, fix the frame rate output issues and then we’ll have a decent app for the mainstream user just looking to put content on their iPhone/iPod. For an app that promises to fix the issue of video codec compatibility, it sure does a poor job of making sure that it itself is compatible with even the codecs it is supposed to support.

AMD has its own response to Badaboom coming before the end of the year. Cyberlink's PowerDirector is supposed to enable GPU accelerated video transcode, but it's a sad day when a video enthusiast has to look to Cyberlink to save the day. What both AMD and NVIDIA need to do is help the open source community and existing codec developers include GPU acceleration in their software today.

I want a CUDA enabled version of x264 or of the MainConcept H.264 encoder. While it's admirable that companies like Elemental would attempt their own codec and front end, there are better alternatives out there today.

There's clearly potential for GPU-accelerated H.264 video encoding, but the first attempt was honestly a bust. Let's hope Elemental or someone else gets it right for round two...