ATI's Avivo: GPU-Assisted Transcoding Platform

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2536' target='_blank'>http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2536</a><br /><br /></div><i>"AMD tried their hand at platform branding with the Turion 64 mobile platform, and today, we're here to talk about ATI's first video platform - Avivo. Much like Intel's Centrino and Viiv, Avivo is a reference to a platform, and as such, it doesn't refer to just one product, but in this case, two. A complete Avivo platform features an Avivo capture card, and an Avivo graphics card. As of today, the only Avivo capture card available is the ATI Theater 550, and presently, there are no Avivo graphics cards available. The next-generation of GPUs from ATI (R520, RV530 and RV515) will all support Avivo, and thus, they make up the second half of the platform."</i><br /><br />So it looks like Avivo exists to address the future of displaying digital pictures and video on the PC, and to perfect the "Video Pipeline". The two stages of the video pipeline to which Avivo pays particular attention are the encode and decode stages. Avivo will support VPU/GPU assisted transcode to/from any of the following media formats: H.264, VC-1, WMV9, WMV9 PMC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX where transcoding is re-encoding of video into a different bitrate and/or different format. There are tons of basic as well as detailed technical detail provided in this article, however I wonder how much of this is an attempt by ATI to come up with a way of convincing consumers to buy all ATI products to be able to gain their true potential.

[Jeremy Charette]

This sounds like a great idea, offloading transcoding cycles from the CPU to the GPU, particularly with the coming HD era. Non-professionals are going to want tools like this to ease the time burden of editing and burning HD video on their home PCs.

One caveat though: what happens when codecs change? WMV10? MPEG-5? Some new implementation of Divx? Will the transcoder built into the GPU be able to adapt? I doubt it. Yet another limited life-cycle product. :?

[sbrown23]

This sounds like a great idea, offloading transcoding cycles from the CPU to the GPU, particularly with the coming HD era. Non-professionals are going to want tools like this to ease the time burden of editing and burning HD video on their home PCs.

One caveat though: what happens when codecs change? WMV10? MPEG-5? Some new implementation of Divx? Will the transcoder built into the GPU be able to adapt? I doubt it. Yet another limited life-cycle product. :?

Partially agreed on your caveat. Then again, how long has WM9 been around now? Quite a while. With Microsoft attempting to get into the consumer space, they cannot continually change codecs. When CE items are based on a particular codec, unlike a computer, they cannot be upgraded willy nilly as the encoding/decoding is done in hardware.

No, I think WMV9, VC-1, H.264, and the current generations of codecs will be around a while. By the time there are a new round of CE devices utilizing new codecs, we'll all probably need new vid cards again anyway.