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By William Van Winkle |
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Video Optimization: From Drab to Fab Keeping in mind that we were stunned at how it took removing the TV tuner requirement to jumpstart Windows MCE's sales numbers, perhaps we should be less surprised at the relative lack of marketing ATI and NVIDIA each put behind their Avivo and PureVideo efforts. These are the names for each company's video processing platform, and the aim of each is to give users the cleanest, most vibrant, enjoyable video experience available on a PC. PureVideo today focuses on video format conversion and playback whereas Avivo (ideally) adds video capture to the chain. At its heart, these two efforts are a continuation of the hardware-based MPEG-2 decoding functionality we saw appear in PCs over a decade ago. It's not that the CPU can't perform the decoding (or transcoding) tasks; it's a question of whether the CPU can do the job while still performing other functions and maintaining a suitable level of available system overhead. The critical codec today is H.264, the high-def compression algorithm at the heart of Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. "Let's say you put a $1,000 Blu-ray drive in a PC," says NVIDIA's Patrick Beaulieu, product marketing manager for PureVideo. "Even the fastest Conroe chips coming out in July are not fast enough to handle the most demanding high-def movies. This is because H.264 can compress data to half the size of MPEG-2 with similar image quality, but it is extremely demanding to decode. If you don't have the right graphics chip doing the decoding, you can forget about high-def video."
This is one of the big gotchas in media center systems, particularly the ultra-small form factor designs that feature IGP graphics and no expansion capabilities, never mind media center notebooks. Even if you could upgrade the DVD drive to an appropriate format blue laser unit, you'd still be stuck with needing H.264 decoding. So far, no IGP has yet been invented that is capable of decoding H.264 at 1080p resolution. In fact, when ATI debuted its free H.264/Cyberlink decoder within the Catalyst 5.13 driver update last December, the guideline ATI offered was that the X1300 could handle H.264 at 480p, the X1600 could manage 720p, but you needed an X1800 GPU to tackle 1080p. This is a rough guideline at best. Continuing driver evolution, beefed-up versions of lower-end GPUs, and faster CPUs may change this situation substantially. But keep in mind that H.264 decoding is only one piece of the video puzzle. Other codecs ranging from WMV HD to DivX to even old school MPEG-2 still dominate the PC video scene, and often what matters isn't how fast the decoding happens but how good of a job the system can do at tasks such as resolution scaling, de-interlacing, bad edit correction, and inverse telecine, all of which figure heavily in converting video from the 24 fps, interlaced broadcast world to something enjoyable on a PC. Perfect conversion yields crystalline video; poor conversion leaves you with a garbled, jittery mess. Within NVIDIA's GPU lineup, all chips support various features of PureVideo, but you don't get GPUs that support all of the current PureVideo HD features until you reach the GeForce 7600 GT.
PureVideo has been a pretty solid if undersold story since its debut. ATI climbed a rockier road with Avivo. Suffice it to say that when Avivo debuted, the only compliant part was ATI's Theater Pro 550 standard-def analog TV tuner. The X1000 GPU family hadn't arrived yet, the HDTV Wonder card became an overlooked stepchild when confronted with the federal broadcast flag brouhaha, and ATI's uber-product, the All-in-Wonder line, was still saddled with the aged Theater Pro 200 tuner chip. Compounding the problem for 2005 was a spate of initial reviews that gave NVIDIA a clear nod for superior decoding quality. But give it up for the Catalyst team at ATI. Those guys work 30-hour days and managed in a few short months to pull even with PureVideo on standard-def decoding and playback quality. The one and only PC industry benchmark to measure this is Silicon Optix's HQV Benchmark DVD. On a scale from 0 to 130, several semi-objective playback tests (noise reduction, jaggies, etc.) are gauged. In December, AnandTech scored PureVideo and Avivo at 51 and 38 respectively. On June 7th, HotHardware posted a review update showing the X1900 XTX and 7950 GX2 in a dead tie at 113. Both companies anticipate perfect scores in the near future (ATI claims to have hit 123 internally and NVIDIA boasts a "15 point improvement"), whereupon everyone will wake up and say, "Now what? We don't have an industry benchmark for HD video performance." High-def is, of course, the next frontier, and history is repeating itself. NVIDIA's new push with PureVideo HD clearly modernizes the platform for next-gen playback, although, although one could argue that HD support doesn't become imperative until blue laser drives drop under the $300 mark and/or HD video subscription services start to go mainstream. We're still at least several months from either condition happening, so ATI has time to reslant Avivo for the HD age. True enough, ATI was first out with H.264 decoding tools, and the X1600 and higher GPUs should perform just as well as equivalent GeForce 7 parts on video processing. But by making the Avivo platform more all-encompassing, ATI also gave itself more work in biting off end-to-end HD support. Company reps assure us that HD progress is coming along as planned, and we should expect great things.
Some things we don't have to wait for. One of the little perks the Catalyst crew tossed into the wild a few months ago was the Avivo Video Converter, a free tool for performing resolution and format conversions, so consumers could, for example, easily lob their TV recordings onto their Creative Zen Vision players. The Avivo Video Converter may not be the absolute best consumer transcoder on the market (that honor is likely Nero's), but it's probably the fastest and friendliest. Users simply select the source file, target folder, target format, and make one adjustment with an output quality bitrate slider. There are also preset output profiles, such as for CD, Sony PSP, or video iPod. Video Converter is also one of the most underhyped, value-rich things ATI has put out in recent memory, and a great system builder move would be to market the Converter as part of your system configuration. Video optimization is one of the biggest secret weapons available to system builders. The irony is that most end-users already have optimization technology. The Display Calibration wizard built into Windows MCE 2005 is an excellent example. Every MCE owner has this tool for adjusting aspect ratio, brightness, contrast, color, and so on, but very few people actually run it within its regular display environment. (The differences in user perception between the buyer's living room and your tech shop can be remarkable.) Display quality matters, especially to customers purchasing higher-end configurations. ATI's Avivo, NVIDIA's PureVideo, and soon Intel's ClearVideo in the G965 chipset enable better video quality than we've ever seen from PCs in the past. But most system owners remain oblivious to the fact that they possess this technology, they're unaware of the value-add advantages it gives over preceding video quality, and they have no idea how to fine-tune these features to optimal settings. If you can educate clients on these points, your systems will shine head and shoulders above the competition if only because no one else is promoting these technologies as part of their own offerings. Spread the Message The same can be said of all three of the major graphics innovations we've covered here. Sure, multi-slot gets a lot of attention, but it's rarely promoted as a mainstream value-add. NVIDIA did almost too good of a job promoting it as a gamer's nirvana, and therein lies your chance to jump onto the scene with a fresh message and unexpectedly low price points. While you're there, multi-slot can pave the way for tomorrow's mind-blowing physics processing. Many customers will be content to wait for greater title availability with the holidays, but for those who need physics now, you've got the AGEIA option ready to roll. Your ace in the hole, though, the technology applicable to just about everyone, is video optimization. We don't see optimization as a product with which to make profit so much as a differentiator you can use to close system sales. Imagine if you found one car salesman pitching the same vehicle you'd seen at the last five dealerships, but he pointed to a button you'd never noticed under the dash and said, "You see that? We did a lot of homework and talking with the manufacturer, and we found out that if you press that button, you'll double your gas mileage." Personally, we'd buy from this guy...just like shoppers with an appreciation for quality and value will buy from you. |
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