Using Two Video Cards Under Winxp

[kirem]

I know that you can drive two monitors under WinXP using two video cards.

BUT my question is can you combine the video processing power of two cards in one machine to drive one monitor and do other video processing?

I use Nero to render video. Often avi into DVD and blu-ray. My samsung Blu-ray player doesn't like AVI, infact it doesn't like much.

would combining the power of two video cards help with rendering?

 

[kram]

Do you have an Nvidia SLI or ATI Crossover compatible motherboard?

 

[thanme]

Yeah apart from SLI compatable cards and a motherboard, I'm pretty certain it's not possible.

 

[Gulf]

No, SLI/Crossfire will not help with what you are describing. That will help with 3D rendering speed of games etc, but not with a CPU intensive tasks like video encoding.

There are programs emerging that can utilise the power of the GPU to accelerate some tasks previously done exclusively on the CPU - things like video encoding. Your ability to use this will depend on the type of graphics card and software you have. It does not necessarily need a second card, and a second card probably won't make it any faster (unless you buy a faster second card!).

ATI - they have their own free AVIVO Video Converter. Requires HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx series of cards.
http://ati.amd.com/technology/avivo/technology.html

nVidia - There are a variety of utilities that use the CUDA technology, though I'm not up with the latest on who-does-what. I think there is a Cyberlink one somewhere, Nero announced they would adopt the technology soon. I'm sure there are others around too if you look around, most charge $$, others may be free. Requires 8xxx or later series of cards.

 

[kirem]

Thanks for the great replies.

I have an ATI card and nVidia card. I am not sure of the models, I'll have a look tonight.

OK so if the CPU does the video rerendering can I use a network of computers to speed things up.

I have 2 computers on a home network.

 

[Gulf]

Technically, yes. In practice though the answer is of course "depends" and "how much fartarsing around do you want to do".

Basically the theory is split your original video into parts, encode parts on separate computers, recombine encoded files. This can be done manually or with automated tools.
Of course the practicality of this will depend on exactly what you are encoding and what you want to encode it to...

For Windows, I'm not sure of anything, perhaps look at this:
http://codergrid.de/
Seems it is still in heavy development. Don't know anything about it but it looks interesting.

For Linux there are a few options (I guess including the above). For encoding DVD to AVI there is DVD::Rip which I have used, though I don't think it will do the other way around which is what you want.

Manually, you will need a few tools.
First, share your video file/folder on the network so the other computer can access it.
Get yourself something to split and recombine video files - on windows I've always used Virtualdub/Virtualdubmod for things like this.
Keep in mind your audio is a separate stream, so you'll probably want to strip it out first, encode it separately and recombine with the finished video afterwards (research: Virtualdub).
Get your encoding tools to create VOBs out of sections of the original AVI - you can probably tell it just to do specific regions, eg 0:00.00-0:45.00 and 0:45.00-1:23.45, if possible try to find a cut/change of scene in the video.
Join the two sets of VOBs together again (research: virtualdub "direct stream copy")
Burn VOBs to disk.

Sounds like a lot of messing around? Yep. Build yourself a HTPC.