Avivo video converter download: ATI AVIVO Video Converter — Download

ATI Radeon HD 4600 Avivo Video Converter driver download free (ver. 9.10)

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter : Streaming into the Future — ATI Stream Update

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Page 1 of 5 — Missed OpportunitiesPage 2 of 5 — What’s New with ATI StreamPage 3 of 5 — Hands on with ATI Avivo Video ConverterPage 4 of 5 — The ATI Stream AdvantagePage 5 of 5 — What about CUDA?

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Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter

For consumers, stream computing has not made much of an impact. And why should it? There are hardly any applications that take advantage of the GPU for this purpose. The competing, proprietary efforts from both ATI and NVIDIA could be a reason why developers have not been as quick to jump onboard, especially those doing consumer applications.

ATI hopes to jumpstart this with the free ATI Avivo Video Converter for the Radeon HD 4600/4800 series. For those who are unaware, it’s a transcoder, which means it can convert multimedia files from one format to another. Such programs have gained importance with the variety of devices that consumers own nowadays and the greater prevalence of digital media. Users want to be able to watch their media on any of their devices, from the smart phone to the iPod. Transcoders that rely on the CPU may take longer than GPU-based ones to complete the task, hence there is certainly interest in a transcoder that uses the GPU.

This utility was released with Catalyst 8.12 and while it worked for the transcoding part, we have heard that it has its fair share of bugs. Hence, we downloaded our copy along with Catalyst 9.2 (Vista) to find out how it performs in its basic task of transcoding videos. Note that the video converter is not bundled together with Catalyst 9.2 but rather an optional 16MB download on the Catalyst page at ATI’s website.

As you can see, we were surprised that the video converter was only accessible through the Basic mode, since we always have Catalyst Control Center in Advanced mode. This should be a big hint on what was to come, which was the relatively simple and to power users, extremely basic options found in this video converter.

Users basically select the source file in the wizard along with the desired output path. Then, they are given a choice of video formats to which the converter is to transcode the source video to. To make things easy for casual users, certain popular formats like iPod and PSP are already included. Following that, users can use a slider bar to indicate the quality of the transcoded video. Ranging from a low to high with no other options, it’s as basic as you can get. The converter estimates the file size and bitrate of the output video according to the quality slider bar before one starts the transcoding process.

Input formats supported include AVI, DivX, MPG, WMV, XviD while the video files can be output in the following formats: AVC, DivX, H.264, MP4, MPG, WMV, XviD.

Our Thoughts

Basic is the only word to describe both the interface and the options available in ATI’s video converter. Inaccurate is another. We found that the estimated output file size and bitrate were rarely in accordance with the final video file produced, at least not for the many videos we were trying to convert. It was not only slightly inaccurate, but rather on the scale of hundreds of megabytes.

Next, there were the crashes, especially when we fiddled around too long or too much with the quality slider bar. At least the transcoded videos appeared to be of decent quality and we did not notice any artifacts that other users have experienced. CPU utilization was also higher than we expected, with at least 30% CPU resources consumed.

Going through the release notes for Catalyst 9.2, we noticed quite a few unresolved bugs in the ATI Video Converter, mostly for Windows XP. This could explain why we could not find the download location of the video converter for the Windows XP version for Catalyst 9.2. Only when we selected Vista as our operating system would the utility show up in our download page. Unfortunately, it will not work properly either in Windows Vista 64-bit, so we recommend that you look through the release notes first.

Page 1 of 5 — Missed OpportunitiesPage 2 of 5 — What’s New with ATI StreamPage 3 of 5 — Hands on with ATI Avivo Video ConverterPage 4 of 5 — The ATI Stream AdvantagePage 5 of 5 — What about CUDA?

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is the best program for converting video files. With this utility, the conversion will be simple and fast.

Fast, powerful, feature rich and easy to use multi-format video converter.

Its main purpose is editing and converting video files from one format to another. All popular video formats are supported, such as DVD, AVI, QuickTime video (MOV, QT, MP4 and M4V), MPEG, WMV, FLV, Sailor Video (MKV), RealVideo (RM and RMVB), Video for mobile phones (3GP and 3G2), AMV, HD video (H.264/AVC, AVCHD/MTS/M2TS, TOD/MOD and TS) and more. All video and audio codecs are supported, including DivX, H.264/AVC, MP3 and AAC. nine0003

Download Video Converter

Supports all key formats (including HD video)
Supports all popular formats, including HD video (H.264/AVC, AVCHD, MKV, TOD/MOD, TS), and also all video and audio codecs. Supported formats: DVD, AVI, MPEG, WMV and ASF, FLV and SWF, MOV, MP4 and M4V, RM and RMVB, 3GP, AMV and others.

Advanced profile system
Using profiles, you can choose the video quality and format you need without thinking twice. The application has a huge number of profiles covering all formats and multimedia devices. You can easily edit them yourself or create your own. nine0003

Ability to save audio from a video file, as well as individual video frames
Now you can save an audio track or part of it from a video file and create your own soundtrack in any audio format. You can also save individual frames you like from the video file to your computer.

Merge multiple files into one
When creating a video consisting of multiple clips, all you need to do is open the source files in the desired sequence, set the «Merge files into one» option in the settings and convert them to any format . nine0003

Deleting any video fragments
Using the built-in editor, you can easily delete any video fragment. After conversion, the fragments will be removed from the resulting file.

Split video into parts
If the source file is too large, you can always split it into several parts. There are two splitting modes for this: by size and by markers.

High-quality conversion
The converter uses only high-quality video processing algorithms, so the conversion takes place almost without quality loss; the quality depends only on the profile you choose. nine0003

High conversion speed
All of our products use multiple processors whenever possible to speed up their work. Also, if you have a powerful graphics adapter on your computer, then it will also be used to speed up the conversion.

High reliability and stability
We have tried to make all our products compatible with all operating systems of the Windows family. You should not encounter any problems while using our programs. nine00003

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ATI AVIVO: Part 1: Video Encoding

Introduction

In the first practical article on AVIVO, we will look at one of the new features provided by AVIVO technology — a special utility for transcoding various video formats using hardware acceleration. This is one of the most interesting features of AVIVO technology, because hardware support for encoding by consumer video chips will be introduced for the first time. In this review, we will consider the beta version of the transcoding utility, we will consider both speed characteristics and encoding quality. Well, in the very near future plans — a comparison of performance and quality of playback and post-processing of video of different formats, from MPEG2 to H.264 / AVC. It will be especially interesting to look at H.264 decoding, because we already have the Cyberlink decoder, which receives hardware support on X1000 series video cards, and it really works, reducing the load on the CPU. But today is only about coding. nine0066

By the way, ATI has prepared a New Year’s gift for all owners of RADEON X1000 series video cards. Not so long ago, they released another Catalyst 5.12 driver with support for dual-core systems, and now, even before the end of the year, they decided to release a special version of the driver — Catalyst 5.13, which has improved MPEG2 support and offers hardware-software video decoding in H.264 format , we will consider the features of all these innovations a little later. The public release of Catalyst 5.13 is scheduled for December 21 or 22. ATI AVIVO Video Converter

So, as we understood from the introductory article on AVIVO capabilities, all new video chips of the ATI RADEON X1000 family support hardware-software video data transcoding, the only requirement is to install appropriate software and fresh drivers. Separate video cards and future video cores integrated into chipsets that support AVIVO technologies offer video compression and transcoding with partial hardware support for installed video chips. Even this partial hardware support is a big step forward, because all previous video transcoding utilities used only the PC’s CPU. nine0003

At the time the X1000 chips were released to the market, the transcoding software was not yet ready. And now only a preliminary beta version of the AvivoXCode (AVIVO Video Converter) transcoder is available, which has not yet been publicly distributed. AvivoXCode works only on PCs with appropriate video cards installed, and all chips of the line are supported, from X1300 to X1800 XT, the current beta version supports transcoding to the following profiles and output formats: MPEG1, MPEG2, Video CD, Super Video CD, DVD, MPEG4 (DivX compatible), WMV9, Portable Media Center, H.264 (AVI), MPEG4 (for Sony PSP) and H.264 (MP4, for Apple iPod). AVIVO Video Converter is a separate application that uses the transcoding engine from ATI Multimedia Center, any format for which the DirectShow filter is installed in the system can be used as the source video.

As you can see from the screenshot, the current version of the AvivoXCode utility is extremely poor in settings, its interface is very simple, you can select the input file, the folder where the resulting file will be saved, there is a choice of format for transcoding and a slider for bitrate. Other than the bitrate, there are no other video stream quality settings, although convenient resolution settings, encoding options for different formats, and audio stream quality settings for such utilities are mandatory, at least in advanced user mode. I hope that ATI will add these features to the final version of the utility. nine0003

Bitrate setting is carried out with large restrictions, different for each of the formats. The choice of possible bitrate values in AVIVO Video Converter beta is very strange. The fact that different bitrate limits are chosen for each of the formats/profiles is an understandable decision. But it also depends on the format and / or bitrate of the input file, which is puzzling. By the way, the step between the values for each profile is also different. So, for the first test video file, the utility offered the following bitrate values, in kbps: MPEG1 (2256-4512, step 564), MPEG2 (2208-4412, step 551), MPEG4 (1128-2820, step 423), WMV9(1128-2820, step 423), H.264 (possible values: 128, 2096, 4064, 6032, 8000), MPEG4 for PSP (128-768, step 160), H.264 for iPod (128-768, step 160). Not a very wide choice, I must say, that’s why we tested with values approximately corresponding to a bitrate of 2000 kbps for MPEG4, H.264 and WMV9 and 4000 kbps for MPEG2. Sometimes it was necessary to retest by changing the values, since the selected bitrate was not maintained in the original file, dropping to a much lower one.

It is also interesting that for some formats the resolution of the output file is automatically changed. For example, a source WMV HD file with a resolution of 1920×1080 in MPEG4 format is compressed by the utility to 640×368 resolution, in MPEG2 output format — up to 720×480, and in H. 264/PSP format — up to 320×192. If everything is more or less clear with the last value, the PSP has a screen with a fixed resolution (although not equal to 320×192), more than which it makes no sense to use, then for MPEG4 such a limitation is surprising. We will consider all the listed shortcomings as shortcomings inherent in the early beta version, after all, it is still far from being completed, apparently.

Performance test

ATI, and with it most reviewers, compares the performance of their solution with NERO Recode, which also allows you to transcode video to MPEG4 / ASP and H.264, but we will go the other way and use VirtualDubMod 1.5.10 for all varieties of MPEG4 (plus the most common codecs for the required formats), and for MPEG2 — well-known transcoders from Cinema Craft and PEGASYS:

MPEG2 transcoder Cinema Craft Encoder SP 2.70

9, H.264). For MPEG2, the bitrate values were always used as close as possible to 4 Mbps, and for other formats — to 2 Mbps.

Test results:

For MPEG2, we only show the results for the first test file in Huffyuv format, because it’s hard to figure out why you need to transcode MPEG2 to MPEG2. It can be seen that AvivoXCode, although a little faster than the closest competitor — Cinema Craft Encoder, but the difference between them is quite small, only TMPEGEnc is noticeably behind them …

Here are the first amazing results! If in transcoding from Huffyuv to MPEG4, none of the test participants came off much, then in the case of MPEG2 -> MPEG4 conversion, AvivoXCode is clearly ahead of all the rest in terms of performance, it accelerated more than three times after changing the original compression format! The only limitation in the form of a slow HDD for a Huffyuv file (almost 500 megabytes, versus 58 megabytes for MPEG2) cannot explain this increase, I think it’s something else, because other encoders increased performance by only 25-35%, and here — immediately 320%. Strange, let’s look further…

Almost the same situation with H.264. It can be seen that ATI’s compression into this format is a little slower compared to MPEG4, which means that some features of the H.264 format are still used, but obviously not all of them. In x264, even with the default settings, some important features that greatly affect the resulting quality are not included, but high-quality compression using this codec takes 10 times more time and this simply has to affect the resulting quality. Which we will look at later, but now let’s return to speed, now the ATI utility will have only one competitor, since the format is WMV9.

Note the biggest difference in clamping time. WMEncoder is clearly lagging behind, even encoding in H.264/AVC is faster than the leisurely work of this application. And again, when changing the source file from Huffyuv to MPEG2, a wonderful acceleration is observed at times.

Surprising and very even results for all tested formats with the ATI transcoder, only H. 264 differs slightly in compression time. One gets the impression that the algorithm in the program is used the same for all formats. But they also have a lot of distinctive features, by applying which you can increase the quality or reduce the bitrate… But since we haven’t even been given the opportunity to change the quality settings in the ATI utility yet, we can’t say anything definite. nine0003

While transcoding to any format, AVIVO Video Converter’s CPU usage is almost always kept at the maximum level, with only small jumps. This is interesting, let’s look at the change in temperature of the CPU and the video chip during the transcoding process, as indirect indicators of the operation of these chips (special thanks to the RivaTuner program for the convenience of monitoring, I would also like to add the CPU usage plugin there …):

does not change at all, while even with the usual decoding of a WMV HD video, it can be seen that the video chip is involved in the work together with the CPU. It seems that the current beta version of AvivoXCode does not really use any video chip capabilities at the moment and all the work lies on the CPU. Probably, ATI will release a version that uses the specific hardware capabilities of the X1000 chips later, and we will certainly consider changes in its operation in our future studies. nine0003

Since we got a very surprising high performance for software encoding from AVIVO Video Converter, we need to look at the quality, because it’s too strange when other codecs are developed for a long time, and ATI immediately gets better results than everyone else, and many times better. Let’s try to understand how such a high transcoding performance is achieved based on a brief analysis of the quality of the videos obtained as a result of testing. nine0003

Testing the quality

Let’s first check the compression results of the first source video file, which was very high quality and recorded in a lossless format. The page contains only fragments of the received frames enlarged twice, the full frame for each case can be obtained by clicking on the link.

Original video file in Huffyuv format, first test frame

MPEG2 AvivoXCode	MPEG2 TMPGEnc

MPEG4 AvivoXCode	MPEG4 XviD

H.264 AvivoXCode H.264 x264

WMV90	0143 WMV9 WMEncoder9

On the fragments of the frame, you can see that AVIVO Video Converter copes relatively well with good quality video data, due to the observed on the bottom-right fragment and in the ® icon at the bottom-left, this is especially pronounced in the WMV9 format obtained by transcoding to AvivoXCode. Let’s look at another snippet. nine0003

It is even more interesting to look at the quality obtained as a result of transcoding the same file, but in the original MPEG2 format with a high bitrate (6000 kbps). After all, the performance results obtained with AVIVO Video Converter are the most surprising there, the compression speed increased by more than three times compared to Huffyuv, which was not noted in the results of other encoders, the gains of which were much more modest, about several tens of percent. Let’s see, maybe the secret of AvivoXCode’s performance in this case lies in quality? nine0002 WMV9 WMEncoder9

This is the same frame as in the case of the Huffyuv file, and the frame fragment is the same. It can be seen that all the formats obtained as a result of the work of the ATI transcoder have the same problems — small details are blurred more than in other software codecs (except for WMEncoder). In general, here the ATI encoder proved to be about the same as in the case of the previous video file, although its performance when encoding from MPEG2 turned out to be amazingly high. Let’s look at one more frame to finally confirm our assessment of image quality …

WMV9 WMEncoder9

The second frame, showing a more realistic situation, slightly aggravated the situation with the quality obtained by transcoding the utility considered in the review. Again, all formats of the ATI transcoder suffer from the same problems (the strange similarity of all fragments reinforces suspicions that there is one compression code for all formats) — the disappearance of a large number of small details and noticeable blockiness of the image, especially in the MPEG4 fragment. But with Windows Media Encoder, it may well compete in quality — it also showed itself not from the best side, blurring everything that is possible. In general, in this example, both transcoders are very far from the quality of XviD and x264. nine0003

Another quality issue found was incorrect transcoding of a 1280×720 DivX file, the so-called DivX HD. Moreover, this error was observed in cases of three different DirectShow filters for DivX 5 decoding (DivX 5.2, DivX 6 and ffdshow) and it did not depend on the output format in AVIVO Video Converter. The result was this ugly picture:

The beta version of AVIVO Video Converter was ATI’s first step towards creating a video transcoder, so far they’ve got a demonstration of high-speed software video encoding. The beta version of the utility is not officially distributed or supported, so all the shortcomings in quality at an early stage are quite understandable. It can be seen that the main task so far has been to show that work on the utility is in progress. Let’s wait for the release and hope that all the problems found will be fixed and the long-promised support for hardware video encoding capabilities will be added. For my part, I can promise that we will continue to research AVIVO Video Converter as we progress on this promising video encoding tool, because its amazing speed gives hope for the best. Well, let’s not forget about all the other aspects of the AVIVO technology suite. Findings

In a nutshell, no miracle has happened so far, we can only see the backlog of an interesting utility, a piece of it. The beta version of AVIVO Video Converter is still rather raw and suffers from a lack of flexible settings and lack of high quality modes, providing in most cases very high performance with full software encoding. Unfortunately, the low level of the final quality of the encoded video does not allow leaving only delights. We will wait for new versions of the utility to get the promised «hardware-assisted video compression and transcode», moreover, with detailed settings. In order for everyone to choose for themselves a reasonable compromise between performance and quality. nine0003

It is still unknown when ATI will publish the final version of the converter and when the real hardware support for GPUs will be implemented. The limitations of the current beta version make the product not very suitable for real use due to the minimum of settings, the lack of support for multi-pass encoding and reduced quality compared to other software products.

Avivo video converter download: ATI AVIVO Video Converter — Download

ATI Radeon HD 4600 Avivo Video Converter driver download free (ver. 9.10)

Popular Video ATI Radeon HD 4600 drivers:

Popular ATI Video drivers:

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter : Streaming into the Future — ATI Stream Update

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter

Our Thoughts

is the best program for converting video files. With this utility, the conversion will be simple and fast.

ATI AVIVO: Part 1: Video Encoding

Performance test

Testing the quality

Original video file in Huffyuv format, first test frame

Avivo video converter download: ATI AVIVO Video Converter — Download

ATI Radeon HD 4600 Avivo Video Converter driver download free (ver. 9.­10)

Popular Video ATI Radeon HD 4600 drivers:

Popular ATI Video drivers:

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter : Streaming into the Future — ATI Stream Update

Hands on with ATI Avivo Video Converter

Our Thoughts

is the best program for converting video files. With this utility, the conversion will be simple and fast.

ATI AVIVO: Part 1: Video Encoding

Performance test

Testing the quality

Original video file in Huffyuv format, first test frame

ATI Radeon HD 4600 Avivo Video Converter driver download free (ver. 9.10)