|
||
|
|
|
              |
|
 |
 |
|||||||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||||
By William Van Winkle |
|||||||||||
During this writing, Google snatched still-unprofitable startup YouTube for $1.65 billion. The service isn't just home to oxygen-deficient teens and people who have no business owning pets. Through YouTube, unknown bands can launch into underground music video stardom. Video game developers post their trailers for mass viewing. Small documentary makers can reach an audience of millions. YouTube streams out more than 70 million videos per day. |
|||||||||||
| digital video isn't a YouTube phenomenon. YouTube is merely the poster child for a multifaceted trend that has been gaining momentum for years. Public companies have been providing shareholders with passable if not riveting shareholder meetings via streaming since the mid- to late-‘90s. QuickTime video was first demonstrated in 1991 and became cemented in the public mind in part because of Apple's early move to warehouse movie trailers and stream them at TV-level quality, an online breakthrough at that time. Microsoft was the first major proponent of high-definition video on the PC with its WMV HD format based on Windows Media Video 9. RealVideo has been a distant third player in the codec race, but RealNetworks has enjoyed some success in popularizing sports webcasting. Today, everybody knows digital video. As consumers, we all enjoy it, whether through streaming, file downloading, or shooting DV camcorder footage of the kids. Less known but becoming increasingly prevalent are the applications for digital video in business. Not only are videos useful as commercials, but they're powerful education tools for both internal staff and external customers alike. Resellers offering DIY kits to end-users might well drop their support call volume by busting out a quick video on the kit's assembly and including it on a CD with the package. Similarly, you might post a 60-second streaming commercial on your home page that illustrates why your VBI whitebooks are superior to their tier-one competitors. After all, do you see tier-ones using video on their sites? Why not spend a few dollars and some production hours to give yourself an advantage?
This same line of reasoning is applicable in most any business. Video is a largely ignored wellspring of potential, but the word is starting to spread. According to AccuStream, video streams rose 50% in 2005 and are projected to mushroom another 32% to over 32 billion streams this year. IDC notes that video services generated $230 million in 2005, a number that will hit $1.7 billion by 2010. "A lot of the places I've been dealing with are small organizations," says Yoav Chutnoff, partner with high-end graphics reseller VP Technologies. "Some of the lower-end digital video editing I've been doing is now going into non-profits, like churches. They're broadcasting or streaming their sermons. A lot of churches are getting into that." Schools of all sizes and types can benefit from video and multimedia in classrooms, and the three-piece cardboard displays of past student science projects can now be replaced with looping MPEG presentations. Any retailer will see the sense of developing video for digital signage applications. Part-time entrepreneurs from wedding videographers to stock footage hawkers can benefit from improving their efficiency with the latest technologies. In short, anyone who can benefit by showing or preserving visual events or information needs to be taking advantage of digital video. Naturally, this is a massive, sprawling topic. Software runs the gamut from Windows Movie Maker—free inside every copy of Windows XP—to the top-end Avid suites used to edit Hollywood blockbusters. With video inevitably comes audio and its host of desktop mics, remote mics, pre-amps, waveform editors, and all the rest. We could spend the next four issues talking about nothing but the various facets of digital video, and all of them would present an intriguing niche into which resellers could find high-margin opportunities. But we're not here to be encyclopedic, only to discuss how to lay a proper DV foundation within the four walls of your whiteboxes. With this addressed, you can branch out on your own into whatever sub-categories your clients desire. Spicing Up Desktop DV The biggest problem any reseller faces is justifying the value of his systems. Why would someone want to buy your box? One good answer in the consumer space might be because your systems are optimized to handle digital video playback better than the competition. Some of this may be in fact, some in presentation. Often, it's some of both at the same time. To the uninitiated, you might think that CPU selection has a lot to do with digital video performance. Across all of the experts we interviewed for this story, not one expressed a preference for AMD or Intel when it came to editing or encoding digital video. Rather, the generation of technology seemed to be more critical. "To put it in perspective," says Adobe's Dennis Radeke, "if I use a Core Duo processor, I can do realtime DV on a laptop. If I do a Core 2 Duo processor, I can do two streams of HDV on a laptop, which is significantly more intensive."
In the same vein, AnandTech recently posted its first preview numbers for Intel's quad-core Kentsfield processor. When performing encoding with DivX 6.2.5 using the XMPEG 5.03 codec, a 2.66 GHz QX6700 Core 2 Extreme (2 x 4MB/quad) finished the encoding run in 77 seconds versus the 2.93 GHz X6800 Core 2 Extreme (4MB/dual) in 106 seconds, putting the dual-core design at a 37.7% disadvantage. Rendering video in Sony Vegas, a popular, multi-threaded editing app, the dual-core Conroe took 50.9% longer on a test job than Kentsfield. Is there an Intel vs. AMD difference? Suffice it to say for now that many independent comparisons of the Core 2 Duo versus the Athlon 64 show Intel at a wide, decisive advantage in this application type. A July shoot-out on Tom's Hardware showed the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo at parity with the FX-62 in H.264 encoding and MPEG2-to-WMV conversion under Premiere Pro 2.0. There was a roughly 20% advantage for the low-end Core 2 Duo in DivX encoding, and subsequent Conroe parts simply widened the gap. How the Core 2 (both dual and quad) stack up against the Athlon FX under AMD's imminent 4x4 architecture (essentially a dual-processor Opteron design ported to desktops) is anyone's guess, but clearly the number of cores and the speed of those cores can make a substantial difference in video encoding times. Similarly, more, more, and still more RAM is better because the larger the system memory workspace in which a user can edit video the less need there will be to revert to using a slower, hard disk-based medium. In higher-end configurations, though, when you step up into workstation platforms, memory may be the area in which AMD saves face. While Intel may have the present upper hand in CPU architecture, it's no secret that AMD's Direct Connect and HyperTransport technologies for the Opteron are far more efficient at handling large memory loads than Intel's narrow front-side bus architecture. We haven't done the testing in house, but we'd wager that in multi-hundred megabyte and larger digital video jobs that stress memory performance (particularly rendering), AMD's approach recaptures a lot of ground. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate digital video value to consumers is through optimization technologies such as ATI's Avivo and NVIDIA's PureVideo. These are driver-based tools that come along for free with supporting video adapters, sometimes even including integrated chipset graphics.
ATI's Avivo video platform debuted with the R520 GPU line and essentially boils down to a five-stage video process: capture, encode, decode, post process, and display. When you look at ATI's present Avivo literature, a lot of this pipeline concept gets forgotten, perhaps because ATI found it harder to market concisely than "better-looking video" and "a fast transcoding utility." (The dumbed-down version of the original pipeline is now "record, convert, play," although you rarely ever hear the recording functionality discussed nowadays.) It might also have something to do with the first stage, capture, hinging on ATI's Theater line of analog-to-digital chips. Theater chips are among the best in the industry, but you don't hear much about them of late, and whether that's because of shifting priorities with the AMD merger or anticipation of a shift to digital TV tuning in 2007 or some other reason is anybody's guess. Still, Avivo at the capture stage entails signal boosting, 12-bit ADC, 3D comb filtering, and hardware noise reduction. The improvements in an Avivo-based Theater 550 Pro product versus the older, non-Avivo Theater 200 are quite noticeable. Now armed with a digital content stream, Avivo's encoder segment takes over. Obviously, there are many popular video codecs in circulation, including DivX, Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-4, and the like. Avivo originally specialized in MPEG-2 technology, which enables DVD movies. More recently, Avivo and the Catalyst driver set have encompassed H.264/AVC, the high-def scheme now underlying everything from HD DVD and Blu-ray to Apple's iTunes video, as well as several other popular file formats. ATI encoding gets a boost from Catalyst now leveraging dual-core processors, but Avivo also moves as much of the encoding task as possible from the CPU to the GPU. This not only improves overall system efficiency but can significantly drop encoding times when using tools like ATI's much-hyped (and free) Avivo Video Converter, which makes painless work of transcoding video content from one format and size to another. So if you have a customer who wants to take recordings and port them out for regular playback on a Creative Zen Vision, you could demonstrate the conversion of a 10-minute video clip from 640 x 480 AVI into 320 x 240 WMV first with Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder 9 (also free) and then Avivo Video Converter. The time delta should prove startling and convince even digital video newbies that not all system configurations are created equal. Remember how some of your system value is in fact and some in presentation? This is what we mean. Yes, Avivo is free when accompanied by an ATI X1K-series video card, but if you don't present the functionality to the customer and make its access easy and obvious when you design the Windows desktop, the client might never know the value present inside your wares. The flip side of encoding is decoding, and while Avivo uses the GPU to help accelerate the decoding of MPEG-2, WMV9, DivX, and other video formats, the real hot zone is with H.264 content. You don't notice much of a system load with H.264-based iTunes content because everything gets scaled down to 640 x 480. At 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, though, the processing horsepower required to decode H.264 in realtime can be crippling. Without GPU assistance, such work will redline most Pentium 4-generation processors, and even new dual-core parts can still see CPU utilization well above 60 to 70 percent. This is bad enough in a desktop environment, but the implications for mobile are even worse. "What's lacking today is a way to decode HD DVD, Blu-ray, and other AVC content at low power and with full precision," says Godfrey Cheng, director of platform marketing for ATI. "The H.264 format is very difficult to decode and display. When the bitrate is really high and the content is hard to decode, you'll suffer either some frame lags or improper decodings. I mean, you cannot watch a Blu-ray or HD DVD movie on battery today, for example. Try it. You'll see that it'll puke. It'll kill the battery, you'll see many dropped frames, and you'll see horrible quality. Soon, though, ATI Avivo will be able to do the full quality at the full bitrate and with low power." H.264 decoding may be the single best way to sell consumers on paying a little more for a digital video-oriented system. Pick a popular Blu-ray title like The Da Vinci Code, House of Flying Daggers, Terminator 2, or something with similar levels of detail and fast action and throw it in a drive like Pioneer's BDR-101A or LG's GBW-H10N. (No, we're not favoring Blu-ray over HD DVD, and yes, we know that these drives still cost a fortune, but you're out to make a point about future-proofing.) You don't even need two systems. Simply do a before-and-after with the Avivo decoding acceleration disabled and then enabled. Of course, you may find it more persuasive to have two systems, one representing an average competitor and then your own value-add box. The demonstration gains even more credence if you have one or two moderate-demand applications running in the background and let customers view the total CPU utilization. In the post processing stage, Avivo performs de-interlacing to turn interlaced content into progressive for PC playback, frame rate conversions, and optimized resolution scaling, among other tasks. Avivo's display component focuses on gamma correction, color correction, and video scaling across a range of output interface types. When you see those Avivo split-screen marketing images where the left half looks all washed out or broken up and the right side looks clear and vibrant, these are the two stages ATI is trying to convey. If you can finagle some footage of cute kids running through a field of flowers or something equally colorful with and without such processing, you should be able to show most any consumer the value of optimized video.
Not to have NVIDIA's PureVideo sound like a me-too to ATI's Avivo (both arrived on the market at roughly the same time), but PureVideo performs many of the same functions as Avivo. NVIDIA delivers similar de-interlacing, scaling, and inverse telecine functions, and you get GPU-based acceleration for WMV, MPEG-2, and H.264. Like Avivo, PureVideo does wonders with saturation, brightness, gamma correction, and color correction across a diversity of video interfaces. Because NVIDIA hasn't had an official TV product until just recently, PureVideo doesn't try to address the capture stage, but NVIDIA has been more aggressive than ATI about promoting its support and suitability for HD content. As you might suspect, judging "superiority" is somewhat objective, and the few objective benchmarks that exist show the two companies see-sawing over time. We should point out that, to date, NVIDIA does not offer a tool like Avivo Video Converter, although one can't be far off. Also, the full functionality of PureVideo is not supported equally across all NVIDIA GPUs. Resellers should refer to www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html for full details, but suffice it to say that while SD content is supported equally throughout the GeForce 7000 line, full HD support doesn't start until the 7600 GT. The rules are a bit different in the Quadro line, but the sweet spot for complete PureVideo support is definitely the Quadro FX 3500. ...more |
|||||||||||
 Back to top
|
|||||||||||
Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form. |
|||||||||||
