Feature Articles

Streaming into the Future - ATI Stream Update

By Vincent Chang - 2 Mar 2009

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter

For consumers, stream computing has not made much of an impact. And why should it? There are hardly any applications that take advantage of the GPU for this purpose. The competing, proprietary efforts from both ATI and NVIDIA could be a reason why developers have not been as quick to jump onboard, especially those doing consumer applications.

ATI hopes to jumpstart this with the free ATI Avivo Video Converter for the Radeon HD 4600/4800 series. For those who are unaware, it's a transcoder, which means it can convert multimedia files from one format to another. Such programs have gained importance with the variety of devices that consumers own nowadays and the greater prevalence of digital media. Users want to be able to watch their media on any of their devices, from the smart phone to the iPod. Transcoders that rely on the CPU may take longer than GPU-based ones to complete the task, hence there is certainly interest in a transcoder that uses the GPU.

This utility was released with Catalyst 8.12 and while it worked for the transcoding part, we have heard that it has its fair share of bugs. Hence, we downloaded our copy along with Catalyst 9.2 (Vista) to find out how it performs in its basic task of transcoding videos. Note that the video converter is not bundled together with Catalyst 9.2 but rather an optional 16MB download on the Catalyst page at ATI's website.

To our surprise, the ATI Video Converter was part of the Wizard in Catalyst Control Center and available only if it is set to Basic mode. We couldn't find the tool when we changed to Advanced mode.

As you can see, we were surprised that the video converter was only accessible through the Basic mode, since we always have Catalyst Control Center in Advanced mode. This should be a big hint on what was to come, which was the relatively simple and to power users, extremely basic options found in this video converter.

Upon selecting ATI Avivo Video Converter, we were immediately greeted by this screen, where we could browse to our source file for the transcoding. Some relevant information about the source is displayed, along with the location of the output file.

Users basically select the source file in the wizard along with the desired output path. Then, they are given a choice of video formats to which the converter is to transcode the source video to. To make things easy for casual users, certain popular formats like iPod and PSP are already included. Following that, users can use a slider bar to indicate the quality of the transcoded video. Ranging from a low to high with no other options, it's as basic as you can get. The converter estimates the file size and bitrate of the output video according to the quality slider bar before one starts the transcoding process.

Input formats supported include AVI, DivX, MPG, WMV, XviD while the video files can be output in the following formats: AVC, DivX, H.264, MP4, MPG, WMV, XviD.

The next step is to choose the format for the output. Some of the options include MPEG-1/2/4, PSP, iPod video, DVD, VCD and Windows Media. There's a slider bar for users to adjust the quality of the output file, together with the estimated file size of the file. And that's all the user can do about the quality settings. It's simple and woefully inadequate for our purpose. The estimated file size is also often way off the mark with the final file size.

Our Thoughts

Basic is the only word to describe both the interface and the options available in ATI's video converter. Inaccurate is another. We found that the estimated output file size and bitrate were rarely in accordance with the final video file produced, at least not for the many videos we were trying to convert. It was not only slightly inaccurate, but rather on the scale of hundreds of megabytes.

Next, there were the crashes, especially when we fiddled around too long or too much with the quality slider bar. At least the transcoded videos appeared to be of decent quality and we did not notice any artifacts that other users have experienced. CPU utilization was also higher than we expected, with at least 30% CPU resources consumed.

Going through the release notes for Catalyst 9.2, we noticed quite a few unresolved bugs in the ATI Video Converter, mostly for Windows XP. This could explain why we could not find the download location of the video converter for the Windows XP version for Catalyst 9.2. Only when we selected Vista as our operating system would the utility show up in our download page. Unfortunately, it will not work properly either in Windows Vista 64-bit, so we recommend that you look through the release notes first.

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