Avivo Video Convertor / Badaboom

GPU computing is something which is fast becoming a very important feature on "video" cards. NVIDIA and their partners have released a number of useful utilities for CUDA enabled cards which all help to enhance the performance of day to day tasks. One such program is Badaboom, a small utility which allows us to convert content from one video format to another with assistance from the GPU. NVIDIA are not on their own in this area though as ATI have their own application for video conversion, Avivo Video Convertor which is bundled with their drivers and is free.

Using Avivo Video Convertor and Badaboom we converted a short AVI file to the best quality iPod format.

Through use of Badaboom we are able to convert the file significantly faster than real-time. The more a consumer converts video on their system, the more they will save time when compared to CPU only transcoding. In terms of the comparison between ATI and NVIDIA, the GTX 460 created the file 5 seconds faster with a result which looked slightly less compressed.