GPU assisted processing

Here is an interesting feature of the ATI Radeon 1000-series GPU’s:

ATI Delivers GPU-Accelerated Video Transcoding

From the article:

Back when we reviewed the new high-end X1800 cards from ATI, we made particular note of ATI's investment in making its new chip architecture shine in GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPU) applications. That is, using the power of the graphics chip for compute-intensive tasks other than graphics.

Many of these tasks are things that everyday computer users simply don't do much of—fluid dynamics equations, protein folding, and other stuff like that. But there's one such task that is already extremely common, and it's growing more so every day—video transcoding. Do you take your videos and translate them to MPEG-4 or H.264 to put them on your PSP? Squash down your DVDs to fit on a CD, or backup those dual-layer DVDs to a single-layer DVD-R disc? Archive your video collection so you can watch all your stuff from your PC without fumbling for discs? Edit together home movies?

If you've done any of this stuff, you're probably painfully aware of the fact that it takes forever to transcode video from one format to another. Well, ATI has a solution coming soon in the Avivo Transcode application

I am one of those users that archives my legitimately purchased DVD collection on my PC which serves as my media centre in my bedroom. This process involves copying the main DVD (which is dual layer most of the time) to my PC which I then compress to a single layer format to conserve space. This compression stage can take up to 2 hours in some situations, and if I would be able to cut down the compression time by simply using hardware that I use to play games, it would definitely be a seller for me.