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
Source Limitations
We've finally got a GPU accelerated video transcoding application, let's transcode some video then, shall we? Not so fast.
Badaboom lacks full Blu-ray support, despite Elemental listing .m2ts files on its supported list. Badaboom won’t decrypt a Blu-ray disc for you so you’ll have to rely on AnyDVD HD to strip out the content protection; unfortunately once you have, you’ll either be met with a crash upon trying to convert the content or an unusable output file.
This happens a lot if you're trying to transcode a DivX file or Blu-ray m2ts
With Blu-ray support out of the question for the initial release, I turned to plain old DVDs, after all that’s what most people have these days. Thankfully DVD support is much better with Badaboom, albeit far from flawless.
While I could transcode my copy of Bad Boys just fine (and ended up using it for most of the benchmarks), attempting to transcode Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi left me with an unusable output file. The source movie was recorded at 24 fps but the transcoded file was a 22 fps movie, resulting in the movie playing back smoothly, but slowly.
DivX support was pretty much hit or miss. While some videos would transcode just fine, others would crash the program. Elemental told us that DivX support is spotty at this point, so the behavior wasn’t unexpected.
Input audio formats are also very limited - only MPEG-1 Layer II and PCM are supported, there’s no support for AAC, MP3, DD/DTS or anything else.
And that’s just the list of issues with various formats we’re trying to transcode...
Functional Limitations
When I first spoke to Elemental about the limitations in the early beta of Badaboom I looked at a couple of months ago, I was told that the professional version would answer a lot of my complaints - offering customizable resolutions, bit rates and more.
In playing around with the review copy I found myself frustrated, once more, by the lack of customization options offered by the program, but I figured the pro-version would fix everything. Until it turned out that what I was reviewing was the professional version.
This table should help explain the differences between the standard and professional versions:
| Badaboom | Badaboom Pro | |
| Price | $29.99 | $99.99 |
| Maximum Input Resolution | 720 x 576 | 1920 x 1080 |
| Maximum Output Resolution | 720 x 576 | 1920 x 1080 |
| AVCHD Support | Not Supported | Supported |
| HDV Support | Not Supported | Supported |
You can’t set custom resolutions in either version, you’re left with the predefined resolutions that Elemental ships with the program. The standard version is limited to 720 x 576 while the pro version will go up to 1920 x 1080. I’ve also had problems where Badaboom will insert a thin black border around the video and slightly squish the aspect ratio when upscaling video.
Those are all of the resolution options you get
The maximum bitrate supported by Badaboom is 5Mbps if you select the AppleTV, Xbox 360 or PS3 profile, there’s no way to define a custom profile - you have to modify an existing one. The lack of full Blu-ray support at this point means that the 5Mbps cap isn’t a huge deal but the combination of the two severely limits the usefulness of the application.
| Profile | Maximum Bitrate |
| iPhone | 2.5Mbps |
| iPod Touch | 2.5Mbps |
| iPod Classic | 1.5 Mbps |
| iPod Nano | 1.5 Mbps |
| Apple TV | 5 Mbps |
| Xbox 360 | 5 Mbps |
| Playstation 3 | 5 Mbps |
The only output format is .mp4, encoded using the Baseline H.264 profile - there’s no support for the main or high profiles of the codec. Combined with the 5Mbps bitrate cap this isn’t too bad, but again it limits the usefulness of the application.
You don't get a full implementation of the H.264 codec, only the Baseline profile with hardware levels up to 3.1
Transcoding a movie? There’s no way to keep Dolby Digital or DTS audio tracks, the only audio output format supported by Badaboom is AAC. Thankfully you can get multi-channel AAC but that’s it. Elemental is working on getting a DD license.
Ten points to the first person to apply a Bad Boys quote to this limited list of supported inputs/outputs
If you look at the laundry list of options you can set when encoding a video using x264 you’ll see that Badaboom comes quite ill-equipped. While I appreciate the simplicity of the interface, the “advanced” button should allow for much more customization than it actually does.
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pk977 - Thursday, November 6, 2008 - link
Try to test it!will not purchase on that software.
comatose - Sunday, August 31, 2008 - link
"and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there"Stopped reading there. What a load of bull.
The bandwidth is just not there? Wireless N (the standard) can do up to 600 Mb/s. Most devices support up to 300 Mb/s.
In practice and depending on the environment, you get about 100 Mb/s.
Blu-ray 1080p is maybe 30Mb/s.
It's connectivity, not bandwidth. Besides, most videos you download online or encode yourself are very very unlikely to cross the 6 to 8 Mb/s barrier. That stuff usually only goes on HD media (such as HDTV or Blu-ray).
Even Wireless B could manage that. The trick is streaming the encoded data to where you want it to be watched, and decoding it on that device.
If you're trying to stream raw video data, then of course you can't. It's not meant to be streamed or be stored on anything.
spinportal - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
The missing line that connects all the dots here is a beefy home video media server that transcodes & streams to all your uPnP / mobile-wireless devices, such as the PS3, Wii, XBox360, PSP, iPhone, wifi enabled phones, wifi Archos, laptops, etc.ATI/AMD has dropped the ball. They tossed their home entertainment chip (Xileon - All-In-Wonder) group, so it doesn't appear they want in this space. They aborted the whole transcode deal after X1000. Is Hollywood (and possibly Cable co's) putting on the pressure?
Now if transcoding multiple streams by a media server with Nvidia cards make it easy to feed a whole house load of people / devices wirelessly (draft-n 2.0 with dual-band), imagine the next reaction for big media would be to squash it. They don't want people having huge collections of movies, be it in h.264, XVID, or WMV format on some multi-terabyte home server (there are some nice single purpose living-room jukebox multi-media players like TOMACRO or TVIX that can access wireless file-servers as well, or stand-alone DIVX DVD players with USB connectivity - to a external USB HDD e.g. cheap 500GB+ storage) which can pump video on demand out. It can then inch out into the SlingBox territory where you can serve out to the net; which TVersity, Orb, etc. others can do, but security and lock-down is for the more technically inclined.
The better the transcoder, the better the bit-rate per stream, and then if that target is reached, the transcoder PC can crunch out even more streams. Most media servers are so-so at the 480p level, much less acceptable quality at 720p or dare tread on 1080p content with decent frame rates; and wireless-n would strain to get even one 720p stream going on a home network. The bandwidth is just not there. But what's to stop some indie service to blast Hulu and YouTube like sites with VOD services? Is NetFlix or ComCast or TimeWarner going to be able to put such powerful transcoder cards to task so they can bring real VOD library to the masses? The state of the art today for the consumer is rather toy-like, and I bet Hollywood would rather it stay that way.
Will this bring cable TV to a true a-la-carte vision were VOD servers rule the day where time schedules will end (TV Guides will be revamped to a library style navigation) and can serve up to any wireless device in your house through the STB / (future) hub? Send a upstream request for a PSP client to get a movie, and the cable company downstreams the best specific format; or a SD-TV in the bedroom via an XBox360 for junior, or the HD-TV in the livingroom, all crunched out by the big iron video servers behind the scenes at the cable co. home base using Nvidia cards (or maybe a few 9500Ms in SLI mode and optimized for CUDA to perform local transcode on the STB?) This second scenario is more likely, where control is under Hollywood's management.
If you were able to download raw TS off a DVR to a PC, the genie would be out of the bottle. Take the raw file, crunch to an acceptable compressed codec, then transcode as needed. Why showcase all your DVD boxes on a shelf? Just have a 2 TB+ SAN with a media server and a wireless-g/n gigabit router to serve all your wireless devices (and quite affordable if you know what you're doing but poor quality). The next step is to have complete transcodes done for your device to take with you on the go and out of wired/wireless range without a middleman approach of using a PC to manage the file drop to a media card. Just pick what you want to store locally on the PVP device instead of stream for later. Imagine that done 10x faster. Imagine 10x the amount of devices you can serve in the house. Your bedroom media hub, the living room media hub, the kids XBox360/PS3/Wii, the kids PSP, your Archos for the transmit commute, your iPhone (for those bathroom breaks - you wouldn't drive and watch your iPhone would you?), a laptop or two, an eeePC in the kitchen for streaming the Food Network, etc. Devices are getting smaller, mobile, and multi-function, yet there needs to be that mainstay PC to be the workhorse video transcoder.
Mr Roboto - Thursday, August 21, 2008 - link
The encode times are alright but it still uses about 50%-60% of my idle E8400 as well. Also it's not good for encoding Hi-Def content as it drops a ton of frames that made the few hour long encodes I did recycle bin material. I'm not impressed at all. It seems they should have added some more options and polished it a lot more or not bothered releasing it just yet.That said it seems like the crowd they are aiming for is the people who really don't care about quality (Or can't tell the difference) and just want to play their PSP's and XBox360's and watch some movies on it once in a while. It seems the wrong target IMO as it's the gamers and enthusiasts who own the necessary hardware to see any benefits of Badaboom. Even my 8800GTX didn't seem to chew through encodes like was claimed. In fact It maybe cut the time in half compared to converting a file in Nero, minus the better quality. If they could really get it to work as they bragged about a year ago it would be something.
You can check out the GeForce Power Pack to see for yourselves.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewithin/us/downl...">http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewithin/us/downl...
Zak - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
No MKV output? No AC3 passthru? Can you say "half assed"?Z.
The Preacher - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
And what about on-the-fly TV capture into h.264? Let me guess... :)They should rather develop it so it could run on any card with programmable shaders. This is just a waste of time and resource.
foolish501 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Downloaded the trial version last week as part of the nvidia driver bundle, and so wanted it to work after reading about it in Maximum PC. Seems extremely picky when it comes to the file types it supports, and would crash so much.Perhaps when it's more stable, and supports more file formats i'll try again
buzzergrain - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
The power consumption numbers are only applicable if the application shuts the computer down after completion.Otherwise idle draw must be subtracted from load draw.
Whichever has a bigger difference between idle and load will therefore be more efficient if running at the same time as web browsing, office work, downloading or other activities such as running the computer as a file server.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - link
Never had a problem with PowerDVD since before the year 2000. Once in a while it will crash, but most of the time that is due to media having flaws(such as DVD disks have deep scratches).HD Video Media is not exactly PC friendly to begin with, and the "DRM specification committee" likes it that way. Maybe we should place some blame on Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Warner Bros., IBM, Toshiba and Sony as well ? Drivers ? Hardware ?
MY OPINION is that since Cyberlink was founded in the mid 90's, and has been writing media based software since at least the late 90's is that: they can not do any worse than this company whom I have never even heard of before now.
Lets not forget that most people who own PowerDVD, got it free with their $36 usd DVD player . . .
Either way, yes this software reviewed is JUNK the way it stands. Hopefully someone will come along and do it right, and MAYBE, the application will even be free :) Something tells me Adobe is paying attention here though . . .
wingless - Monday, August 18, 2008 - link
I want to see a review with Cyberlink's ATI GPGPU implementation of hardware transcoding. Cyberlink will probably have their software code a lot cleaner and usable and the HD4870 should have plenty of horsepower if theoretical peak FLOPS is any measure.