Thomson is releasing Firecoder Blu (link in Japanese), a “graphics card” dedicated to video-decoding and encoding(MPEG2, MPEG4, AVCHD, H.264). For one the term “graphics card” is misused: it doesn’t connect to a display and it doesn’t really process most graphics that you’ll see on your computer – this is not a graphics card as most of us know it. Instead, think of it as a video processor that’s there to decode and most importantly transcode (encode) video. Encoding can be a huge time-saver, depending on how well it’s done, as usually special software is required.
Decoding is easy. NVIDIA, Intel and ATI all have chips that can do it for less than $12 (bulk prices, my guess). I think that of the three, only NVIDIA can encode faster than real-time video using Badaboom. Intel can obviously do it on the CPU (slowly), but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
For pricing this hardware video-encoder $599, I think that Thomson is crazy. Who in their right mind will buy a co-processor that’s half the speed of a PS3 CPU, while you could get a GeForce GTX 280 for $390 that is a graphics card *and* a possible hardware video-encode device? I’m not sure who did the market study on this, but I sure would like to know how many they intend to sell…
Links
Adobe Premiere GPU Encoding Plug-in (H.264)
MPEG, MPEG2 GPU encoding
GPU encoding review (Anandtech)
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