ATI Avivo Video Converter...Where Is It?

[Jeremy Charette]

http://ati.amd.com/technology/Avivo/images/module-graph(2).jpg

Okay, I'm officially stumped, and maybe you guys can help. I've got an ATI Radeon x1900 video card, and I decided to check out AMD's Avivo technology (http://ati.amd.com/technology/Avivo/technology.html) for faster video transcoding. According to their "how to" page (http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=21793), I should be able to access it from the Catalyst Control Center. Only one problem: it's not there. I can't seem to find a separate download for it on ATI's website. I've got the latest Catalyst Control Center and x1900 driver software installed, and I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate, but the Video Converter is non-existent. I'm frustrated and bewildered. Has anyone else out there had better luck than me?

[Jason Dunn]

I've always found this whole thing incredibly confusing. Is Avivo transcoding a separate application, or is it just a hook that an Avivo-compatible video editing application can use to speed things up?

Here's what my Catalyst control panel looks like:

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/ati-avivo-jasondunn.jpg

So Avivo is there, but there's nothing other than settings for how video is displayed.

[Jeremy Charette]

Exactly! I get the same Catalyst Control Center, but I can't find the damn Avivo Video Converter. The x1900 can supposedly transcode video very fast, but if I can't use ATI's Video Converter it's useless!

:?

[Jeremy Charette]

Surfing Google, it looks like there's no Vista support for many Avivo functions just yet, including video transcoding.

I hate to say it, but I'm contemplating going back to XP. :evil:

[Jeremy Charette]

Okay, so now I'm installing the complete Avivo pack under additional downloads for XP. Let's see how well it plays with the Vista Catalyst Control Center.

[Jeremy Charette]

Okay, I found the Avivo suite for XP buried here (http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonxavivo-xp.html)on ATI's website. I've installed it on Vista Ultimate, and transcoded a sample 1080p WMV HD video clip from Microsoft's website, into iPod video format. The result: horrible. Choppy, and it goes green every few frames. Trying video clip #2, an AVI in Divx format. Let you know in about 15 minutes.

[Jason Dunn]

Surfing Google, it looks like there's no Vista support for many Avivo functions just yet, including video transcoding.

<sigh> Figures. I'm a *bit* surprised by that though because ATI has been quite progressive with Vista support.

I hate to say it, but I'm contemplating going back to XP. :evil:

Really? You transcode that much video to h.264?

[Jeremy Charette]

I just transcoded "Coral Reef Adventure" from 720p WMV HD to MPEG-2, 853x480, and the video is as smooth as glass. It transcoded it in just about real time, which is phenomenal for HD video.

I'm still having no luck transcoding into .mp4 for the iPod. The video quality is terrible, choppy, pixelated, green...something's not right with the Codec in Vista. *sigh*

I have no idea why ATI isn't supporting and promoting Avivo more. This would be a great way to sell more video cards, as there are millions of people out there who are transcoding video every day, particularly to their iPods. I just don't get it. :roll:

[Jeremy Charette]

Really? You transcode that much video to h.264?

It isn't just h.264. It's Divx and xVid as well. Vista chokes on them. I like putting my videos on my iPod, and I can't do that with my Divx files, as the resulting video (no matter what transcoding software I use) is compressed to half height in the top half of the video, and the bottom half of the video is bright green. Quite a few of my Divx videos won't even play in Vista.

I really like Vista, I do, but there's too many little things that are still broken. Hell, I can't get a native Vista driver for my HP printer. That's frustrating.

[rogerben]

I think the rule of thumb is to only use ATI's applet for quick-n-dirty transcodes. It doesn't batch, and the quality ranges from pretty good to mediocre... but it's fast and easy to use, so I still fall back to it on occasion.

RE: ATI promoting the applet

I speculate that they're holding off on really pushing it until they produce a version that actually uses their GPU for acceleration.

[Jeremy Charette]

ATI apparently doesn't want to get into the software business, instead using Avivo Video Converter as a demo for the platform. They want to put in the Avivo hooks for other software vendors like Nero to latch on to, but so far I haven't seen anything but playback support for Avivo from 3rd party vendors. No encoding or transcoding support.

So far I've struck out twice on Vista: Instant Video To Go and Avivo don't work. :?

[David Horn]

I just transcoded "Coral Reef Adventure" from 720p WMV HD to MPEG-2, 853x480, and the video is as smooth as glass. It transcoded it in just about real time, which is phenomenal for HD video.

Would you not expect that result on *any* computer? Since MPEG2 is, AFAIK, effectively uncompressed compared to WMV HD, if the computer can decode the video in realtime in the first place it's really just writing that stream straight back to disk.

[jeffd]

david, theres a big difference between good mpeg2 encodes and bad. Good is when you do a nice slow 2 pass with the likes of tmpeg Xpress. Bad is when you use the multitude of single pass "realtime" mpeg2 encoders out there (usually its part of a tv tuner package).

Avivo isn't compleat, its buggy, and best of all, it still dosn't actually use video hardware yet. Avivo is supposed to be an encoder that gets a speed boost from ati's gpu, but currently it is %100 software/cpu driven and has actually been (easily) hacked to work on non ati video cards.

Theres a large lack of settings in avivo to customize data rates and resolutions, so I find it pretty much useless.

[Jeremy Charette]

Yeah, as it stands, Avivo is pretty much useless. When they can enable GPU acceleration, and really put the hooks in place for 3rd party vendors to utilize, we'll see see some seriously fast video encoding.

It seems like just yesterday I got excited because my PC came with a separate floating point co-processor.