San Francisco (CA) - It appears that graphics cards have finally found a non-gaming marketing focus: Video.

Both ATI and Nvidia have been beating the drum of video transcoding for some time, promising a far better experience in transcoding your HD and SD videos into handheld formats such as Apple's iPod/iPhone or Sony's PSP. Of course, hardware acceleration does not work without software and both ATI/AMD and Nvidia are relatively weak in this area. It is one side to demonstrate a cool technology, but you really want to have an actually retail/e-tail friendly product to create a convincing story.

Luckily, CyberLink has caught up with GPU transcoding capabilities in summer of 2007 and started to work on adding transcoding to its own software stack. One year later, we are seeing result: The company’s PowerDirector 7 Ultra ships with GPU-accelerated video transcoding.

Shuichi Takagi, CyberLink's vice president of of business development ran a demonstration on a just launched ATI Radeon 4850 512 MB, proving that the hardware and software is capable of converting four HD MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4 simultaneously - in real time. According to Shuichi, it will take about 30 minutes to process four full-length movies and compress them into handheld-friendly 200+ MB files.

CyberLink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra is available now for $120.

Best news I've heard in a long time

Jun 25, 2008 15:55     

I actually prefer more to work with video editting than gaming on my systems so this is excellent news for me. Primarily because I have been putting off an upgrade for so long. I also always loved my ATI AIW cards, so hearing that the demonstration was run on the new ATI cards makes me that much more confident to pick one of them up along with the Cyberlink Software. I will have to do a little research to see how it compares with other video editting software. Never used Cyberlink before. Sounds really impressive with the hardware acceleration though.

Nick B. report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

NIvidia

Jun 25, 2008 18:50     

WIll it WOrk WIth Nividia Or just ATI ??
Harsh report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1