Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Take a look at that image above. It's from an article on Tom's Hardware that talks about how Intel's QuickSync technology - which is part of the Sandy Bridge platform - stacks up against GPU acceleration from NVIDIA's CUDA and AMD's APP (formerly Stream) technologies. The numbers above are simply shocking: GPU acceleration using CUDA or APP gives an almost 2x performance increase in HD video trascoding...yet, amazingly, Intel's QuickSync manages to get the same job done 5x faster than CUDA or APP. And let's be clear about something: it's able to do that with an integrated GPU that's part of the overall CPU, not with a beefy, power-sucking, loud graphics card that costs $300+. Read more...

TMPGEnc MovieStyle ($39.95 USD) is video encoding software created for device-specific encoding. It has a slick, user-friendly interface that's quite easy to use - once you get it working. TMPGEnc MovieStyle, like its more expensive big brother TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, has an extremely irritating online activation security scheme. I won't repeat myself here - you can read about my dislike of this sort of software protection in my other TMPGEnc review - but I find myself especially irritated because I installed this software to test it while I was a passenger in a car driving back home after visiting some friends in the countryside, and I wasn't able to use the software because I didn't have Internet access. I thought maybe on this cheaper, consumer-focused video encoding product, they'd have a more relaxed approach. There's not even a graceful limited trial mode for the software when it can't be activated - it simply won't load until the license is activated online. These sort of heavy-handed, "treat your customers like thieves" tactics are frustrating to see. But let's get on with the review, shall we? Read more...

Product Category: Software

Manufacturer: TMPGEnc

Where to Buy: TMPGEnc Web site

Price: $99.95 USD

System Requirements: The software will work on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000. Since video encoding is a CPU-intensive task, the faster your CPU the faster the software will work.

Pros:

• A huge variety of video import and output formats;
• Makes great use of multi-core CPUs;
• Software is fast and responsive.

Cons:

• The cut/edit tools are confusing and limited;
• Seems to have trouble with certain AVI files, no support for KV files;
• Requires online product activation; EULA restricts you to one install (but see below).

Summary:If you're looking for the ultimate level of control when it comes to video encoding, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is one of the best tools on the market today. When you consider that you can purchase video editing programs such as Premiere Elements for $99, TMPGEnc seems fairly expensive at $99 - but if you're tired of the limited video encoding options that most consumer-level video editing programs offer, TMPGEnc is a breath of fresh air and well worth the investment. Read more...