Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Well, it looks like Toshiba isn't just keeping its Cell-based SpursEngine chip confined to its laptops and super-resolution DVD players, as Leadtek has now also taken the wraps off a PCI-E card that'll let you add some of that "faster than real-time" HD video transcoding to your desktop PC. Dubbed the WinFast PxVC1100, the card promises to encode and decode H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video with ease (and entirely in hardware), and it includes 128MB of 1.6GHz XDR memory to aid in the process."

I was initially really excited about this, because anything that speeds up h.264 encoding is of benefit to me, but the devil is in the details, and these details are looking a bit devilish: pricing looks to be about $285 or so in Japan, so I might see it in North America for around the $249 to $300 mark. I'm willing to pay to save time, but $300 is a pretty steep ticket. Any modern GPU worth its silicon does assisted decoding, so for most computers the only benefit will be encoding - and not everyone is as impatient as me. There's also the matter of it having a fan on it - I hate noisey computers. I really, really hate noisy computers, and I'm surprised with that large heatsink they weren't able to cool it passively - I'm hoping that fan is ultra-low RPM and deadly quiet. I might be judging this product too harshly, but rather than being a $99 "sure, it can't hurt" product, this is as expensive as a mid-range gaming video card. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that both NVIDIA and ATI are just at the beginning of their own path of using our GPUs to assist the encoding of content. This product has a rough road ahead of it...

"I reported more than a year ago and repeated in this year's predictions that Apple would be adding H.264 hardware support to its entire line of computers. The chip they are adding comes from NTT in Japan and was developed in cooperation with Japanese broadcaster NHK. The chips began sampling a year ago and should now be available in volume, though Apple may be paying as much as $50 each for early production...The NTT chip is not just an H.264 decoder, it encodes, too, which is what makes it so special. The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they've already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they'll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second."

The quote above is from one of my favourite technology pundits, Robert X. Cringely, and his article on what he thinks is going to be coming from Apple. I think it makes a fair deal of sense. h.264 is a truly spectacular format for video, but it's also spectacularly taxing to encode and decode. The decoding side of it can be handled with enough CPU muscle, or any number of decent video cards. Read more...