The multimedia market is asking for powerful hardware accelerated encoding solutions to speed up the processing time for video beyond what the CPU alone can offer. The demand for a hardware accelerated encoder that can be used on Windows can now be satisfied with MainConcept’s new OpenCL™ H.264/AVC Encoder. It offers amazing performance making use of OpenCL™ Hardware Acceleration, while providing excellent quality.

OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) is a cross-platform standard for parallel computing that is used on many ATI graphics boards. It allows a significant increase in encoding performance by offloading most of the resource-intensive encoding features to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). In this case, the system’s CPU utilization is dramatically reduced and can be used for other tasks, while the GPU does the decoding, scaling and encoding work. In contrast to CPUs, the graphics boards' GPUs provide a parallel architecture that consists of a large number of cores, and each core is able to run thousands of threads simultaneously. This is further enhanced by the multi-level memory model introduced by this new open standard.

With the rapid progress in GPU technology development and the large number of GPU based graphics boards in the market, taking advantage of the GPU’s power for video encoding makes sense for both consumer users as well as professional markets and industries, such as simulations in medical, science and research, content creation, medical imaging scans, etc. In the end-user segment, OpenCL™ encoding in combination with the ATI Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK (formerly ATI Stream SDK) speeds-up the time consuming task of converting your home movies into the H.264/AVC format on various platforms and also reduces CPU utilization so that the computer can be used for other purposes while encoding. The OpenCL™ standard was developed and is managed by the Khronos Group, a consortium of leading companies in the digital video market.

MainConcept is making it even easier by providing software developers with a flexible yet powerful software development kit to add OpenCL™ accelerated encoding to their own solutions. The MainConcept OpenCL™ H.264/AVC Encoder SDK allows powerful encoding into the H.264/AVC Baseline, Main and High Profile formats. It offers many features found in our software H.264/AVC Encoder that is included in the MainConcept Codec SDK. Using the MainConcept OpenCL™ H.264/AVC Encoder, the whole H.264/AVC conversion process is done on the GPUs, except for entropy encoding which is done on the CPU.

Click here, to have a look at the performance and quality test results of the MainConcept OpenCL H.264/AVC Encoder.

Please note that the MainConcept OpenCL H.264/AVC Encoder only works with ATI/AMD graphics hardware. For NVIDIA GPU based acceleration, click here for the MainConcept CUDA H.264/AVC Encoder.

If you like to learn more, please visit the OpenCL™ Zone at http://developer.amd.com/openclzone

For Windows, the codec package consists of a Low Level API (in the C programming language). It additionally includes a DirectShow filter for encoding.

• Baseline, Main and HighProfiles
• I, P and B frames support
• CABAC/CAVLC entropy
• Deblocking filter
• Intra-blocks in P-frames
• 4x4 intra partitioning
• CBR (Constant Bitrate) support
• HRD model maintenance
• VBR rate control
• Support for bitrates of up to 100 Mbit/sec
• Interlaced mode support
• Input resolution up to 1920x1080
• Performance is ~100fps for 1080p video on a top ATI hardware (strongly depends on the host PC performance and H.264 settings)

• OpenCL™ H.264/AVC Encoder

• Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32-bit/64-bit)

Supported ATI Graphics Boards:

• AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics
  6900 Series (6970, 6950)*, 6800 Series (6870, 6850)*
• ATI Radeon™ HD Graphics
  5900 Series (5970)**
  5800 Series (5870, 5850, 5830)*
  5700 Series (5770, 5750), 5600 Series (5670), 5500 Series (5570)
• ATI FirePro™ Graphics
  V8800*, V7800

* - preferred as tested
** - supported in single-GPU mode

Required drivers:

• ATI Catalyst™ 11.2 for Radeon HD cards - "ATI Catalyst™ 11.2" (with OpenCL support, file must have "ocl" suffix in the name)
• ATI Catalyst 10.12 (8.801) for FirePro cards (ATI Stream SDK 2.3 have to be installed)

See details at http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/pages/DriverCompatibility.aspx#conformance

©2010 Advanced Micro Devices, In. AMD, the AMD Arrow, ATI and the ATI logo, FirePro, Radeon, Catalyst, The Ultimate Visual Experience, and any combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos