Hi All I need some help with speeding up HD encoding. A couple of days ago I encoded 3:30hrs of HD 720p footage to Mpeg2 Blu-Ray. It took 12 hours! I came across this site after hearing about 'Softmodding' gamer nvidia cards to they act like Quadro cards. It sounded great until I realised that I can't do with the GTX260 card. My current setup is as below i7 920 - 2.6Mhz 6GB 3 x 2GB GTX260 768MB I've also just been a bit trigger happy and bought a 8800 Ultra from ebay. I'm hoping that I'll be able to softmod this to a Quadro FX5600(i think). Will this help much on the encoding front??? Is there any other tweaks I can do to speed things up? Will the hard drive have much to play in this? Thanks in advance James
You don't have to mod your card to do that. You just need a video encoding software that supports CUDA. Then you can use your graphics card to accelerate video encoding. NVIDIA loves to promote BadaBOOM, but I've heard that the encoding quality leaves a lot to be desired. Of course, some folks are just too fussy. You can try that and see if it fits your requirements.
Leadtek makes the HPVC1111 and PxVC1100, which are dedicated cards featuring a SPURSEngine (Toshiba CELL SPE) processor that speeds up video encoding. Technically it is purely dedicated to video conversion. These cards are supported by TMPGEnc and Adobe Premier. Suggest you look out for the reviews around, although i'm not sure there are any (Good idea for a review comparison?) Either way as Adrian said it totally depends on whether your software can use CUDA's instruction set. A few examples would include PowerDirector 7, MediaCoder (FREE WEI!), Nero Recode under the MoveIT package and so forth. Hopefully you'll find something you like.