Just tried AVIVO for converting to IPOD

[CuriousMark]

I have an HP Media Center PC with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a gigabyte Radeon x1300 video card (added by me). I wanted to try AVIVO to speed up iPod conversions. Here are the results.

A one hour show recorded in basic quality on a 540 converted using tivoconverter under control of the tivoconverter wrapper took about 21 minutes to convert to AVC H264.

The same show converted using AVIVO in the Catalyst driver control panel took roughly 8.5 minutes to convert. Both look the same to me when played back via WMP.

It looks like AVIVO on an x1300 is about 2.5 times faster than the CPU. For those with faster video cards, I would expect even better results.

By the way, AVIVO seems to be directshow aware, I simply pointed it directly at the *.tivo file and told it where to put the result.

CuriousMark

[bmgoodman]

Are you telling me that you didn't have to load any "special programs" to get AVIVO to translate your Tivo files? ATI specifically told me that AVIVO would NOT work with Tivo files, so I bought an nVidia card instead. :mad:

[CuriousMark]

Are you telling me that you didn't have to load any "special programs" to get AVIVO to translate your Tivo files? ATI specifically told me that AVIVO would NOT work with Tivo files, so I bought an nVidia card instead. :mad:
I bought the gigabyte brand card online from newegg. It didn't come with the catalyst drivers so I downloaded those from the ati website. I simply installed it and then fired up the catalyst control center, navigated to the AVIVO conveter page, selected a .tivo file from the My TiVo recordings folder and selected the My TiVo Recordings for Portables/MPEG-4/ for the output location and pressed the button to start it. 8.5 minutes later it was done. I was sure the resulting file would be garbage and that it just wasn't throwing any error messages. I was pleasantly surprised when WMP played the mp4 file just fine.

Sorry to hear they don't even know the capabilities of their own software. I have read that nvidia has their own similar software for their card that probably does about the same thing. Are you using it, do you like it?

Mark

[bmgoodman]

I am not aware of anything like AVIVO made by nVidia. I thought AVIVO was made possible by something in ATI's hardware, that nVidia lacked. In any event, I spent extra money on this nVidia card ONLY AFTER ATI told me I could get no benefit using their card with Tivo files. Sounds like I could have saved $150 and gotten faster transcodes. Stupid @$%^'s at ATI.

[CuriousMark]

I just looked. nVidia's version is called Purevideo and it looks like it does a lot of what AVIVO does, but does not seem to have a transcoder application. It probably is a fast codec though.