Beautiful hardware rendered H.264: are we using yet?

klykly
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
We already have it! The awesome AVIVO tech in the X1600! So both the Macbook Pro's and iMacs have it, but in previews and the like, it's been mentioned that the Macs don't have drivers for it yet, though Windoze does. However, it's been a while since we've had MBP's now, and it seems no one's mentioned AVIVO since then. Where are our updated ATI drivers? Or do we already quietly have them (unlikely)?



Apple has been pushing the H264 tech quite heavily with Quicktime, marketing and all sorts of things. If you have a look at any of the HD content (trailers and the like) on the net, apple is right there with QT, pushing it. Isn't it then rather ironic that I have to install Boot Camp and reboot into Windoze to enjoy beautiful, fast H264 video rendered by my X1600?



Does anyone have any info on this?



Thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    I can smoothly play 1080p H.264 in QuickTime Player. I assume that's purely software-accelerated so far, but it sure is "good enough" for most purposes. I'd appreciate Apple adding hardware acceleration support, but it doesn't seem urgent.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    klykly Posts: 21member
    I think that's what Apple's currently riding on. No one's complaining since everyones happy with what they have.



    Having a hardware decoder has a number of benefits: firstly it's a dedicated video processor that will post-process the image using things like 3D comb and all sorts of cool things for much superior image quality, even if what we have now seems pretty good. If you compare software OpenGL rendering without mipmapping and the like to hardwar-assisted rendering with anisotropic filtering, HDR, antialiasing and the like, you can see what I'm getting at, though of course, the gap in graphical quality and performance isn't quite as pronounced for video.



    Secondly, AVIVO isn't just a decoder, it's an encoder/transcoder too. From the site:



    Quote:

    ATI?s Avivo Video Converter can take a 30 minute recorded show, and convert it into a format playable by an iPod in less than 5 minutes. It can cut the conversion time by 80% or more.



    I don't have an iPod so can't compare Apple's encoder to this, but if I look at the x.264 encoder included in Handbrake for DVD ripping, H264 encodes at about 60%-80% of the original framerate. With AVIVO, we're getting about 600%! Granted, the iPod video resolution would be much lower than a DVD, but I think from what I've seen on the net is that most people are happy with getting iPod encoding in real-time (ie. 100%). This is a hell of a lot faster than that.



    Lastly, the hardware en/decoder takes the load off the CPU. Not that big a concern for us since we essentially have 2 anyways , but freeing up the CPU to do other things is always a plus. It'll be especially important for encoding, since when decoding, you're pretty much just going to watch the movie and not do anything else, but for encoding, you can set it to do its thing then move on to your normal work / play without worrying about that much of a slowdown.



    The only thing I wonder about is how AVIVO handles the video things with respect to the other 3D circuitry on the chip. If it can't do the two efficiently at the same time then we have a problem, since Quartz uses OGL and 3D stuff to do most of its rendering.
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