Leadtek’s card has the same CPU (a Toshiba SpursEngine, based on the Cell CPU) but the card’s design differs slightly from Canopus’ effort: Leadtek’s card needs additional power fed in via a 4-pin floppy drive connector to power a cooling fan which is missing from Canopus’ card. The PC I decided to install the card into had another GigaByte motherboard, but with two PCI-E 1x slots. For shits and giggles, I first attempted to install the card in a PCI-E 8x slot. No way, no how. Mobo wouldn’t even see the card. Yanked the card out and placed it in the 1x slot, and hey presto, mobo found it and Windows started whining about drivers. Next step: install drivers, Pegasys TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress and TMPGEnc SpursEngine plug-in.

Update #1: First test running on a 64-bit Vista SP2. Source is 1080i 29.97fps MPEG-2 and has a length of 1h27min. TMPGEnc is outputting 1080p 29.97fps H.264 (video only, audio will be muxed in separately) and reports the process will take 61 minutes. Note that I don’t have an Nvidia graphics card in this PC so TMPGEnc is not using CUDA. It wouldn’t speed up the encoding in this case anyway as TMPGEnc uses CUDA for filters (color correction, sharpening, re-sizing etc.) only, and I didn’t use any. TMPGEnc lists deinterlacing under its Filters tab, however, so that might have profited from CUDA. It seems deinterlacing is now being done by the CPU. Quad Core utilization this very moment: 2%, 34%, 12% and 57%.

Update #2: It worked like a charm. TMPGEnc churned out an .MP4 file which I muxed with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio from source file (demuxed with tsMuxeR) using MKVmerge 2.2.0. MPC-HC played the resulting .MKV perfectly and even lip sync was spot on. Next up: what TViX 6500 thinks of the file.

That’s certainly an improvement I’m willing to pay some good money for. While looking further into the card’s specs, I noticed something very interesting indeed. Its SpursEngine CPU is based on the Cell processor and is actually a stripped-down version of the CPU powering Sony PlayStation 3. SpursEngine incorporates Toshiba’s “Super Resolution Technology” which is supposed to work miracles with SD-to-HD upconversion.

There are some drawbacks, of course. Firstly, the price. Firecoder Blu has a price tag of ~550 euros (VAT incl.) here in Finland. That’s not cheap, although it’s not terribly expensive either, provided the card does what it promises to. Secondly, the card is designed to work with Canopus EDIUS NLE software and especially with its Firecoder Writer software. Judging by the release info, Firecoder Writer is very basic, with limited file format support and offers little in the area of parameter tweaking.

Luckily there’s another solution for the software side. Japanese Pegasys Inc. has implemented support for the SpursEngine on its famous TMPGEnc Express encoding application via a SpursEngine plug-in. TMPGEnc 4.0 Express and the plug-in are available on Pegasys’ webstore for the bundle price of $149.90.

Also of interest to video encoding professionals is the NVIDIA CUDA support built-in to the TMPGEnc. In other words, plonk in a CUDA enabled NVIDIA GeForce graphics adapter and you’ll see improvements in encoding times. Here’s some figures lifted, um, borrowed from Pegasys’ website:

While CUDA on its own can cut down encoding times by up to 40 percent, it’s the combination of SpursEngine and CUDA which will really hike those fps rates up. A test encode which took 46:21 minutes on a Pentium D 2.80 GHz was completed in less than 8 minutes using the same CPU accelerated by both SpursEngine and CUDA. That’s a massive improvement, no matter how you slice it.

Now, if 550 euros feels a bit steep, you’re in luck because there’s a cheaper alternative. Leadtek, known for various video-related components, has released a WinFast PxVC1100 add-on card which is based on the very same SpursEngine CPU as Firecoder Blu. The best bit? PxVC1100 is priced at under 220 euros and it comes with a fully functioning TMPGEnc + SpursEngine Plug-in combo. The worst bit? The product is very thin on the ground at the moment and can be difficult to find in Europe.

I will be receiving a Firecoder Blu later this week, followed by a PxVC1100 a few weeks later. Expect a more thorough report on both, and the TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, once I’ve made them jump through a few hoops.