Encoding Your Videos My Way.

So you have a shiny little device like an android, iphone, or ipad. You want to watch movies on it. The problem is, it just takes forever to encode the videos. That was always my problem, I hate encoding. It slows down your computer and pretty much renders it useless for other tasks and it also takes forever. So what’s a bored media-junky to do?

Well, I always knew GPUs had lots of horsepower and I’ve always wanted to harness those little ponies for the greater good of satisfying my boredom while on a plane or waiting for my wife to finish shopping.  I embarked on a quest for a CUDA powered transcoder.  Lo and Behold!!! I found one that works wonders!  The upside?  It’s free!

Mediacoder NT CUDA Edition.  If you have a relatively recent Nvidia graphics adapter in your machine, it’ll use your GPU to transcode your video into H.264 format suitable for viewing on your portable device.  Did I mention it was fast?  How fast?

Regular Video plays at 30 fps (in the US).  Media Coder encodes on my old 17″ Macbook Pro (early 2008 edition) at approximately 97 fps.  So basically in 1/3 the time of the video.  (20 minutes for a 1 hour show).  All this happens while my computer is still usable (not at all laggy).

Pretty cool, huh?  On a desktop or a newer Macbook Pro, I’m sure it’ll do it even faster!!  Eventually, when I get a PC, I’ll test it with a new graphics card, but in the meantime, it means transcoding 8 hours of video in a little over 2 hours.  Compare that to the 8 hours it would take the CPU to do the same job in while making the computer pretty much unusable.

Kudos to the Mediacoder Team!  You guys rock!