9.0.4.5 GPU Encoding/Decoding Won't Work, Catalyst Crashing

[TheaterNut]

I got that impression as well. Interestingly, my Alienware M18x R2's i7 3840 has the HD4000 integrated graphics but also has the slots for up to two dedicated graphics cards that are swappable (I was thinking of adding a second 7970m to boost DVDFab's performance until I found out that it can't take advantage of dual graphics cards). Of course everyone's comfort level with opening up their laptop to swap graphics cards is different, but it's not a complicated process and there's plenty of YouTube tutorials out there on how to do it.

Unfortunately my desktop had been sitting unused for the last year until I started ripping my movie library recently, and it will most likely go back to being unused once this project is done. Because of the recent Alienware purchase, the wife nixed my mobo/processor upgrade plans for the desktop, so I won't get a chance to play around with QS on the new 4770

[martythebrit]

I think your laptop is one of the few exceptions, I can't see video cards being installable on the regular consumer grade laptops.

Don't you hate it when the wife does that.

[TheaterNut]

Agreed, most laptops have easy access to the memory and hard drive only. My Alienware still has to come completely apart (bottom cover, HDD, keyboard/palm rest and monitor all removed) to get at the graphics card, but at least the graphics card is removable. Not sure if this is the case with other brands.

I can't complain too much - my wife is very forgiving about my expensive wine and home theater habits, but I was particularly looking forward to the mobo/CPU upgrade since I haven't done one before. Maybe I'll wait a while and try to think of another reason why I need it

[TheaterNut]

This discussion got me reading about various hardware acceleration methods for re-encoding movies at lower bitrates. I quickly stumbled upon this:

http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/

A couple things stood out when reading this and other reports. Firstly, it seems that GPU-based acceleration for encoding - whether Intel QS, CUDA, DXVA, or ATI - have a significant quality penalty in exchange for their decrease in encoding time. Secondly, x264 is by far the best available codec and has been for quite some time, and it can produce an image of equal quality to the methods listed above with as little as half the bitrate. Thirdly, it seems that using any of the above accelerators for the decoding process shouldn't yield any quality penalty as all properly-designed decodes should yield identical results for a given codec and bitrate.

I did some searching and couldn't find which algorithm DVDFab uses in its software-only encoding mode - does anyone here know?