ATi couldnt pay me enough to use their broken Avivo converter.
From Anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3578 :
" Certainly, for a free utility, we would not expect the same level of compatibility and quality as we would from a commercial application like Badaboom. But what we saw really didn't even deliver what we would expect even from a free application."
"In fact, only one file we tried to transcode came out with acceptable quality and it still had artifacts. There was color distortion, blur/softening of edges, and blocking artifacts."
Buggy software, you say? Couldnt possibly be a hardware problem, could it? Lets try some third party software, then.
"MediaShow Espresso is a software conversion tool that is similar to Badaboom in that it's purpose is to transcode video and that it can use GPU hardware acceleration. The big advantage, however, is that it can use either AMD or NVIDIA hardware in the transcode process.
"We attempted to encode three videos. While our watermellon transcoding worked perfectly fine on the CPU, guess what happened when we took a look at our AMD GPU accelerated output. That's right. Artifacts. Similar to what we saw with AVIVO Video Converter, but less severe. NVIDIA's image quality was much cleaner than the on AMD hardware using Espresso as well. This was encoding to MPEG-4 AVC and maintaining the same resolution from input to output.
"Armed with this data, it is clear that transcoding on AMD hardware is not ready for primetime"
Ah, but the AMD card is surely faster, no?
..............................Bruno Trailer..MacGyver DVD....Watermellon
Intel Core i7 965.......3:53...............6:43....................0:38
GTX 275...................1:56...............3:04....................0:12
Radeon 4890.............2:02..............8:41.....................0:31
So is there another "workaround" for this one?
I know which card I would pick for transcoding