Took delivery of Leadtek’s WinFast PxVC1100 MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card last week (thanks, Dacco!) but have been way too busy to install it… until a few moments ago. I had a bunch of problems trying to install a Canopus Firecoder Blu transcoding card (equivalent to PxVC1100, but 2.5x more expensive) into my new video editing PC as the card refused to work on a GigaByte motherboard. More accurately, the card refuses to work in any other slot except PCI-E 1x — which on the GigaByte mobo is blocked by a tall-ish heatsink. In the end the only solution was to re-purpose another PC and build it as the new video editing PC. Its Abit mobo had no problems with Firecoder Blu once the card was installed in a PCI-E 1x slot.
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.