Which Video Converter for Mac uses Open CL and is therefore fastest in Snow Leopard?
Ideally I would like to use one which takes full advantage of the new technology in Snow Leopard (grand central and open CL)
Any suggestions other than these?
Does anyone have any numbers to confirm speed.
Thanks
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M$5 Answers
Currently to take advantage of OpenCL you must have one of the following graphics cards in your computer.
NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870.
On top of that, the new QuickTime X in Snow Leopard only supports H.264 Video Acceleration (encoding and decoding) with NVIDIA 9400m GPUs, which essentially limits you to the unibody line of MacBooks (as you have outlined in your question).
Because both OpenCL and the QuickTime X H.264 Video Acceleration are part of Snow Leopard, and rely on its underpinnings. None of the apps you outlined (including QuickTime 7) will take advantage of these speed boost tell they are re-writen to take advantage of OpenCL, QuickTime X and Grand Central.
BUT, because you are talking about video conversion, OpenCL is NOT the best method suited for doing video conversion, rather it was designed so that you can use a GPU to do "other" computing tasks. When your doing video conversion the GPU is all ready designed to do this exact kind of thing (if Apple uses the right GPUs). Rather than hijacking the GPU with OpenCL, you are going to be much better off using something that takes advantage of the GPU acceleration natively (as does the new QuickTime X for doing H.264 encodings).
Now, because VisualHub is dead (long live VisualHub), and it's new open source incarnation isn't ready yet (if it ever will be), this long trusted app can't be recommended. In fact under Snow Leopard VisualHub (even with QuickTime 7 installed) is more or less broken based on the testing I have been doing.
QuickTime 7 itself (why'ed they go an break its features in QuickTime X) is still usable under Snow Leopard, but will NEVER see the speed boosts as it is a dead end. Apple's $ are in QuickTime X, and it does NOT doe the same stuff as QuickTime 7 (as of today).
The Final Cut Studio 3 Pro Apps (Final Cut, Motion, Compressor and so on) don't take advantage of any of Snow Leopards enhancements from what I (and others I work with) have been able to determine, and it probably never will. That's why it was released before Snow Leopard. Compressor is the only app in FCS3 presently optimized for the multithreading. The core code for all the tools is not 64-bit. None of them are Grand-Central Dispatch aware, and only Motion has minimal support for GPU-based rendering.
All this tells me that until Apple comes out with a FCS3 patch or update you won't see speed boost there. They might not even upgrade the apps tell FCS4 (if that ever happens).
That leaves us with iVideo Converter and Handbreak (although there are a plethora of other video converters on the market as well).
iVideo Converter says that it supports Snow Leopard (10.6), but it relies on the FFmpeg code base for part of what it does. As the FFmpeg community has just started recompile under 64 bit Snow Leopard it may take some time for something to happen here, but there is hope.
The same goes for Handbreak. Handbreak all ready support 64 bit under Linux, and it uses FFmpeg as as well, so doing Handbreak for Snow Leopard 64 bit support shouldn't be to hard once all the pieces are in place.
But none of this means that these apps will take advantage of OpenCL, Grand Central or the QuickTime X H.264 Accelerations.
As I said above, QuickTime X does support accelerated video decoding and encoding (but it's not as versatile as QuickTime 7 Pro) to H.264 video today (with the an NVIDIA 9400m GPU). But it does not use OpenCL from what I understand, and why should it sense it uses the GPU natively for acceleration.
Time will tell, but hopefully it won't be to long tell something emerges that takes advantage of Snow Leopards enhancements (OpenCL, Grand Central and/or GPU acceleration). Something tells me we won't have to wait to long.
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M$
p.s. VisualHub is now dead and not being supported anymore. The source code was opened up and it's now being developed under the name Transcoder Redux. If you're daring you can try out one of the alpha builds here: http://www.transcoder-redux.com/
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
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M$You can download this software free from here
http://macdvdconverter.com/mac-dvd-converter.html
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M$http://www.macvideoconverter.org/
http://www.macdvdconverter.com/mac-video-converter.html
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M$
So the first numbers are out for a video encoding app using Grand Central, and OpenCL. They are very impressive to say the least.
The numbers come from Christophe Ducommu who makes an app called MovieGate. In his initial test of optimizing MovieGate (using FFmpeg under the hood) for Grand Central and OpenCL to encode a MPEG-2 video, he found an almost 50% increase in performance.
Here's a perfect example of a video application that doesn't use the native QuickTime encoding engine, and is very CPU intensive. So Grand Central and OpenCL can help, and it does.
This also bodes well for performance enhancements for any video encoding app that uses FFmpeg under the hood.
To see the full article go here:
http://www.hardmac.com/news/2009/09/16/positive-effects-of-grand-central-and-open-cl
To learn more about MovieGate go here:
http://web.mac.com/cducommun/MG_English/Home.html