HardwareUSB TV & Video Capture
ADS Instant Video To Go H.264 Hardware Encoder Review
March 29th, 2007 |
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| Encoding video to H.264 has always been a painstakingly slow process, often taking triple the time of the original run time to convert a film. No wonder one people would rather drop several hundred bucks on a new rig or a ATI's AVIVO-capable video card. Short of a massive system overhaul, perhaps the most practical way to speed up the conversion is with a hardware encoder. So far, the ones I've seen are targeted at the pros and priced prohibitively. Enter ADS Instant Video To Go, an affordable, hot-pluggable H.264 hardware encoder. | ||
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Review Verdict
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Essential Specs & Stats
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One of a Kind USB Dongle
Where to Buy?The ADS Instant Video To Go's relatively large size almost fooled me into thinking the dongle might be a USB TV of some sort. Turns out the Video To Go is a unique USB stick that can speed up the transcoding of a movie into iPod / PSP compatible formats. Despite the software compatibility with popular video options, the hardware acceleration is reserved for the more complex H.264 (AVC) codec. The AVC is widely known to produce higher image quality compared to others at the same file size, but it isn't the practical choice among users as it taxes too much on CPU resource during software encoding process. Personally, I can't really tell the difference since all these are just re-re-conversion of the original and because you end up watching the videos on a tiny screen.  ADS Instant Video To Go put beside a iPod shuffle. Upon launching the ArcSoft Media Converter 2 - the only software bundle, you'll see a friendly, self-explanatory interface. You begin by picking the device that the converted files will play on and the preferred choice of quality level. Then you can queue virtually unlimited number of videos, but cannot unfortunately select different encoding parameter for each. Lastly, select the file destination and hit convert. With each file, you can preview beforehand so you know ArcSoft has no problems playing the video. The software, however, still has to decode the video before sending to the dongle for processing; hence, your CPU isn't just sitting tight.  These are all the available settings for iPod video conversion. Note that I photoshopped the drop-down menu so they all show up in the same screenshot.  3GP (MPEG-4) playing on E61 (left); M4V (AVC) playing on iPod video (right).  QVGA video encoded by the ADS Instant Video to Go playing on my PSP. Besides the QVGA and VGA, other resolutions are available when you choose XviD, DivX and ArcSoft's MPEG-4, but non-AVC won't benefit from the hardware acceleration. I'm not sure if ADS plans to extend native support for these equally popular formats. For real-world tests, I spent most of the time converting VOBs - the container for MPEG-2 on a DVD - to iPod-friendly AVC .m4v files. And almost immediately, I knew ArcSoft Media Converter wasn't made to deal with different streams inside a VOB. There's neither audio selection nor subtitle support. You also can't queue up the VOBs and expect them to join together as a single movie. To get around this, you need VOBMerge. On the other hand, preparing a batch of DivX/XviD/WMVs for the conversion was just simple drag and drop.  These are all the other formats supported by ArcSoft, but do not get hardware acceleration treatment. To find out the comparative performance of the Instant Video To Go on various machines, I picked a Celeron 2.2Ghz and a Core Duo running at 1.8Ghz, both of which were running Windows XP SP2 and 1GB RAM. The source was a 30 minute MPEG-2 recorded at 9.8Mbps in VOB. On the aging Celeron, the video conversion into 640x480 AVC low-complexity baseline (1.5Mbps video, 64kbps audio) took 3 hours and 45 minutes using Videora. The same PC managed to complete the transcoding in 36 minutes, close to real-time, with the aid of the ADS Instant To Go. The improvement was nothing short of breathtaking. I repeated the test on the Core Duo to see how this relatively modern CPU fared against ADS dedicated H.264 co-processor. The result was a pleasant surprise. The Instant Video To Go raced to the finish line in 25 minutes, 5 minutes earlier than the Intel. While the ADS still pulled ahead of the multi-core, software was obviously the more scalable solution when the encoder is optimized for multi-thread. Here, Videora in the latest version 2.11 was able to distribute the loads across several threads, which make better use of the extra core. Below is the benchmark I obtained from the the tests. Keep in mind that iPod video and PSP can play QVGA (320x240) content at 15, 24, 30fps so you'll save even more time by going with this lower resolution and frame rates. I started out the test with the highest quality setting possible, because the videos are more future-proof. Benchmark
In the end, I was left wondering why no one has come up with a solution like the ADS Instant Video To Go sooner. ADS did the right thing to bring this nifty gadget to iPod video and PSP enthusiast group in which some people see no reasons to upgrade their rig for the sole purpose of speeding up their software encoder. My experience with ArcSoft Media Converter was satisfactory. The software is primarily aimed for ease of use, and it does the job of streamlining the entire conversion process. However, I hope ADS and ArcSoft can improve VOB support and incorporate XiVD/DivX hardware encoding. Highly recommended to any iPod & PSP owners without a PC powerhouse.
Reviewed by Ian Chiu, Managing Editor |
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