hello,
i bought PNY VCG8600GXXB (GeForce 860 GX) )video card to speed up the video conversion on my CENTOS 5.4 running on sempron processor.


What software can i use to do video conversion of different video formats?


thank you.
Andrew

Unless i am mistaking, the video card has nothing to do with video conversion, that process depends on the CPU (processor) not the GPU (videocard).
The videocard will make a difference with watching video but not converting them.
Faster cpu, more rams, these thing will help.

Exactly, no video card I know of can help with video conversion (although it's not a bad idea). Using vdpau, however, it will take lots of strain off the CPU when WATCHING a video using mplayer.

The video card only processes stuff that is drawn on the screen, so it has nothing to do with converting video formats.

When you convert video formats, the CPU decompresses the original format, and then compresses it with the new format.
So that's like thinking that a better video card will make gzip run faster.

well, after reading a bit around, now i understand now that i had a misconception of the current state of affairs.
It appears that CPU (to my amusement) is the main source of power for the video related calculations.
Why am i amused? Well, it's easy to see that the GPU is specialized HW designated and optimized just for that specific task - work with video. Plus the performance of the GPUs far exceed the perf of CPUs (in the floating point operations). And there is no doubt that this trend is going to continue.
It appears logical to design the (conversion) program that would first try to use specialized HW (API) for the task and, only in the absence of latter, use common API calls for the task.
Otherwise the purchase of the card seemed to be a nearly total waste of money to me .. (i don't play games).

Another reason why i was so mistaken is a successful existence of several application for example - folding @home (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-highperformance) :
an interesting project : http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=GSoC_-_G...Video_Decoding
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Hardware...Video_Decoding

Maybe you had CUDA in mind ?
Well, it's there for linux and it should be possible to rewrite ffmpeg accordingly. So, if you have the time, knowledge and so on ...

Not really, because even if you don't play games, your card (a basic entry card in today's standard) will be put at use with today's desktop eye candy, like Compiz.
But you would make a point if you had bought the latest $499.00 Radeon HD 5870, total waste of money on a linux box.

No, it's designed to render instructions sent to it as 3D or 2D images. (i.e. Draw Rectangle at point x, y; with the dimensions w, h, of color c)

Video formats don't really have anything to do with this, just think of them like gzip or bzip2, just optimized for video data.

Same goes for audio formats.

So when converting video formats, the computer is actually unaware that the data is video -- it's just a string of bytes. Conversion just implements the decompression algorithm of the original format, and then the compression algorithm of the new format.

Well, you could say that GPUs are specific processors, they are specifically designed to process graphics (why they are called GPUs), while CPUs are general processors, they are quite versatile and can process a large number of different things. However, compared to GPUs, ONLY IN THE FIELD OF GRAPHICS PROCESSING, CPUs are less efficient, and it makes sense why, because they are not specifically designed to process graphics, their main strength instead lies in their versatility.

Now, I know that nvidia has made cheap supercomputers using their cards recently and supposedly this shows how GPUs are better than CPUs ... and of course this is BS propaganda done by nvidia so that you can buy their products. The reason why they can do this is because graphics cards, due to their small size and type of interface, can easily be attached to a special motherboard and thus can be made into a supercomputer (not really, because it isn't like a regular computer and cannot be readily used as such, it is designed for a specific purpose). CPUs are somewhat harder to do this with because of the interface with the mobo (larger and harder to scale up), so you would need a different kind of setup and will end up with a much larger supercomputer (albeit a real supercomputer, and much more versatile).

So, in conclusion, if you want faster video conversion get a powerful new CPU instead. If you get multi-core make sure to use a program that can make use of this (mencoder can, ffmpeg cannot really do this efficiently, not from my tests).

yeap, that's why i said "nearly". It's $15 so i might just leave it.

get program ( lives ) and tragtor )
they both crash a few times
lives takes longer than tragtor
after you find what tragator will load it flys

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regardless of cpu/ gpu i would suggest
xvidenc/ h264enc
both depend on mencoder

no idea what either of the 2 programs you mantioned are and where can i locate them.. Maybe you meant "traKtor"?

MTK,
i see your point. Well, it's a valid one . I just wish that in 21 century there were an altrernative to CPU.

Thank you all - it was educational for me.

ffmpeg, mencoder and transcode.