An interesting feature of Windows 7 has been talked about today and I haven’t seen much information about. At COMPUTEX 2009 Microsoft talked about Windows 7 having native video trancoding that will speed up the copying and transcoding of video files when working supported hardware,the example was a Nvidia Ion netbook five times faster than a Atom based machine when copy a HD video file to a portable device
The implementation was seamless as Henry simply dragged and dropped the high definition video file onto a Sony Walkman portable media player in Windows Explorer, where it automatically started transferring the file onto the Walkman.
The demo included an Ion-based machine and another, similarly specced machine without Nvidia integrated graphics – the Nvidia-based machine finished the transcoding task around five times faster than the Atom-based PC with Intel integrated graphics, taking just over 1 minute 30 to complete.
via bit-tech
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I assume this is actually a result of the GPU offload support in Direct X 11, which has been known for a while, rather than anything in Windows 7 itself (Vista users will be able to install Direct X 11 too). I’m assuming this will eventually replace both NVIDIA CUDA and ATI Stream as ways of offloading video transcoding to the GPU.
From Gabe Frost, Program Manager at Microsoft working on Play To and related technologies:
“This is not the GPU/DX10; but rather, Win7 support for SHED hardware (secure hardware encode decode). Some GPUs can implement this interface in Windows, and other parties are building custom chips to implement. In addition to device sync supporting these chips for transcode, media streaming will also use them to offload the transcode process from the CPU. Cool stuff.”