[FFmpeg-devel] transcoding on nvidia tesla

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 11:36:49PM +0000, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> "Dan Khasis" <dan at novapulsar.com> writes:
> 
> > I can make a significant contribution to get this going, and purchase a card
> > or two for development testing.
> >
> > When it comes to converting thousands of videos per second/minute on one or
> > two teslas, versus 10,000 servers across 10 datacenters, using kilowatts of
> > power, the costs associated with several of these servers become irrelevant.
> >
> > I guess the real question is if it's possible, how long it would take, and
> > how much I would have to contribute :)
> >
> > Based on my understanding of how well the developers of ffmpeg, have made
> > ffmpeg the de facto video conversion application, I think it's safe to say
> > they can do this too.
> >
> > With a tesla or two, you could be transcoding thousands of HD streams
> > simultaneously.
> 
> I doubt the performance boost would be as big as you suggest.

And you are right, a lot of the encoding/decoding is massive bit
fiddling, and while the GeForce8 stuff is at least _able_ to do, they
are still horrible at it.
Which basically means two things:
1) You can increase the performance at least to the inverse of the
amount of bit-fiddling needed (so 10x seems very optimistic).
2) But you can do all kinds of video filtering almost for free.

Greetings,
Reimar D?ffinger