Believe the Unbelievable: HD Capture on an Intel Atom Netbook

May 8th, 2011

Netbooks have proven to be extremely useful tools for games journalists, offering extremely mobile computing with great battery life – great for live-blogging and event coverage in general. Following a discussion on the DVInfo CineForm forum, I wondered whether these useful little mini-laptops could actually be re-factored into an ultra-cheap 10.2″ battery-powered HD capture unit when used in concert with our forthcoming Expresscard-HDMI offering.
The odds are stacked against us. Current laptop CPUs use up to 45 watts of power, but the Intel Atom CPU found in netbooks only requires a miserly 2.5 watts. Indeed, the surrounding chipset soaks up far more power. Designed for minimal applications – running Windows, a browser and Office – the 1.6GHz Atom’s performance has been equated to an aged Pentium M running at half the clock speed. That’s six to seven year old CPU technology. Asking for real-time compression of HD video with such meagre power seems almost too ridiculous to contemplate.
For our purposes, the CPU has to compress 720p input at 60 frames per second to such a degree that the footage can be streamed onto a 2.5″ notebook hard disk – a drive inherently slower than desktop equivalents. Not only that but it needs to sustain a full frame-rate real-time preview window, so you can actually see what you’re capturing. For the Atom platform, this is a bit of a problem in itself as the chipset uses CPU to emulate the hardware overlay required for the preview, sapping precious processing resources. On top of that, ideally we’d also like to run the display cloned onto a monitor via the VGA output – squeezing RAM and bandwidth.

It’s alive. In this video you are seeing an Intel Atom netbook capturing Bayonetta – one of the most problematic compression challenges available – via HDMI at 720p60, using the AmaRecTV software package in combination with the AMV codec. An h.264 MP4 of the actual video that was captured is available to download here. The AmaRecTV tool gives some useful stats – no dropped frames at 720p60, though the real-time preview window hovers around the 57fps mark. While the tool registers Expresscard-HDMI as “S-Video”, the card is merely using the S-Video channel – this is digital HDMI all the way. A TrueHD workstation was used to record the VGA and headphone output of the netbook.

The first challenge was to find a netbook with the Expresscard slot. They’re not so easy to locate as Expresscard is typically only found now on business-orientated laptops and, as far as we know, there is no modern machine currently in production that combines this slot with an Atom – aside from a Gigabyte tablet unavailable in the UK and grossly expensive any way.
Fortunately, what this does mean is that the units which are capable can be cheaply acquired on eBay. What you’re looking out for are machines such as the ASUS N10J (which has dedicated GPU and an HDMI output), Lenovo S9e, Lenovo S10e and the HP Mini 2140. N10J aside, they all have the same core innards – the N270 Atom and the lacklustre 945GC chipset. The ASUS machine most likely offers the best functionality, while the HP Mini is undoubtedly the coolest, looking rather like a miniature Macbook.
The machine I located was a bit of an oddity – a Vye V81006 – a netbook I believe was solely distributed to certain UK educational establishments. £88 on eBay makes it a bit of a bargain and while I would have preferred an ASUS or HP, the cheapest I’d seen them for was around the £130 mark. The Vye came with 1GB of RAM and a Toshiba 160GB HDD, which luckily proved to be quite fast. Fast HDDs are good news for this experiment because there’s not much CPU power here for compressing the image, so the faster the drive, the less compression you need.
The first test was to see if the Expresscard-HDMI card actually worked. While the Expresscard slot should offer full PCI Express x1 bandwidth, USB is also supported so the concern was that only the USB connection would be implemented. There was some initial despair as connecting the card achieved absolutely nothing. However, similar to the Macbook Pro we tried recently, the card was recognised when we rebooted. No hot-swapping support then, but the driver worked so things were looking good.
With the card established as working and the capture tool producing an image, the task then moved onto what we could do with the limited CPU power available. CineForm has talked about their encoder being able to reach 1080p at 20 frames per second on a base Atom, but with the added overhead of the capture tool and real-time preview factored in, unfortunately it proved to be too much for the Atom – even on the lower quality settings. This is a shame as CineForm is by far the most flexible and image-quality orientated intermediate codec on the market today, and a single core Pentium 4 can manage 720p30 easily.
UT Codec Suite has received plenty of plaudits as a fast, multi-core aware lossless codec but the best sustained frame-rate I could achieve on the netbook was 720p at 30 frames per second. Good enough for most uses, but not all… 720p60 should really be the target here.

So, are we really getting a full 720p60 HD capture from a netbook? And what’s the quality like? These are two shots from the Bayonetta capture session in the video above. Click through for the PNG loveliness.

Runaway winner proved to be the AMV codec, used in conjunction with the same developer’s AmaRecTV app. The faster lossless modes would encode a 720p frame in around 10-12ms, which is frankly phenomenal and more than enough for 60FPS capture, but with filesizes running at 80MB/s, a 2.5″ laptop HDD just wouldn’t be able to keep up. Even a desktop drive would struggle. Moving to the more computationally expensive lossless modes brings down the capture rate on the same material down to a more manageable 35-40MB/s, but CPU time moves up to 14-16ms. You must keep below 16.66ms in order to keep a sustained 60fps capture.
The problem here is that the additional CPU load impacts the performance of the real-time preview window. If Intel had possessed the foresight to give the Atom a chipset with a hardware-driven video overlay, this would not be a problem (and chances are that the ASUS N10J with its NVIDIA chip will take care of this and open up more encoding options with the extra CPU time) but the default 945GC chipset powers the overlay via a software driver, so the challenge then becomes a question of finding a display mode in AmaRecTV that has the least drain on available resources. Thankfully we did and sustained 720p60 capture on really challenging material was confirmed.
It’s clear that while it’s possible to record HD video on a netbook, a set-up with more CPU power is preferable. A 13.3″ laptop would do the job beautifully and in the form of something like the new Dell Latitude E6430, you have a Sandy Bridge powered machine with all the CPU processing power you could possibly need. Plus it has a modular bay optical drive that can be replaced for another battery or a secondary HDD.
But there’s still something to be said for doing it all on a netbook – by far the most flexible and portable piece of mobile computing tech on the market today, and I think that I’ll stick by the Atom-powered 1kg computer for my own portable capture needs… though if an N10J pops up at a bargain price on eBay I don’t think I’ll be able to resist it.

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MacBook Pro vs. Digital Foundry Expresscard-HDMI

March 29th, 2011

Does it work on Mac? Digital Foundry hardware is designed for PC and we do not offer native Mac OSX support for any of our devices. However, the reality is of course that for a while now the base architecture of all Apple Macintosh computers has been based on Intel chipsets. To all intents and purposes, they are effectively PCs, with a few custom modifications, and BootCamp should allow any PC expansion card to work on Mac.
Expresscard-HDMI adheres exactly to PCI Express standards and the only compatibility issues we have seen thus far have come from the laptop-side where full implementations of the standard are not utilised.
MacBook Pro is a curious case. Expresscard support was all but phased out two generations ago, with the slot replaced by a flashcard reader. However, the slot remains in effect on the 17″ Macbook Pro, though user feedback on the compatibility of the slot has been far from complimentary, with many devices simply not working at all on Windows 7. So it is with Expresscard-HDMI. However, drop back to Windows XP and the compatibility issues are reduced drastically (the only issue seemingly being that you need to boot the machine with the card inserted, when it should be hot-swappable). Here are a couple of pictures showing the magic happening…

Expresscard-HDMI in action on a 17″ 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, with the full-screen preview displaying HDMI input from the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3. Click on the thumbnails for full-size pictures.

This MacBook Pro, owned by freelance journalist, consultant and Prima Games strategy guide author David S J Hodgson is pretty much a standard unit, with just a couple of alterations. The original hard drive and superdrive are gone, replaced with dual 128GB SSDs - as that’s the way that he rolls. One drive operates OSX, while the other runs Windows.
In this configuration, Expresscard-HDMI support for quality-based h.264 real-time encoding would be useful for recording a lot of 720p video onto not a lot of SSD storage space, but David’s plan is to capture using an intermediate codec (such as CineForm HD) onto an external hard drive via FireWire or USB 2.0. At 720p30, the 30MB/s throughput of USB 2.0 should absolutely fine.
An alternative solution here would be to set-up a small BootCamp partition on the main drive, then use a secondary mechanical drive in the superdrive bay formatted into the NTFS standard. Capture using Windows, edit using OSX: CineForm HD is the only high definition codec where files are interchangeable between Mac and PC.
HD capture on a MacBook Pro with no external chassis: it’s happening.

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New Hardware Announcement: Expresscard-HDMI for Laptops

February 20th, 2011

Digital Foundry is pleased to reveal Expresscard-HDMI: a completely self-contained HDMI capture solution for notebook/laptop PCs, designed for video games industry professionals. Expresscard-HDMI is a 34mm expansion card, for use with PCs running Windows XP 32-bit, and all versions of Windows 7.
Simply by hooking up an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, Expresscard-HDMI allows you to use your existing laptop computer as a monitor/recorder for console gameplay, featuring support for 480p, 576p, 720p and 1080i HDMI standards. The adoption of a standard DirectShow driver allows users to utilise their own preferred capture software and video codecs should they so choose.
Digital Foundry’s recommended set-up allows for both lossless and lossy HDMI capture with a minimal CPU overhead – in tests we can successfully record real-time gameplay at 720p60 and 1080i30 using just a 1.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-based notebook, while maintaining a 60Hz hardware-accelerated full-screen preview window. Choose a laptop with an HDMI output and you have an instant video passthrough.
Step up to a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo or better, and our preferred set-up allows users to encode directly into quality-based h.264 at 720p60 using the renowned x264 encoder. In this scenario, every single frame is encoded to a set quality level, giving a video stream far higher in quality than the consumer-level hardware h.264 systems on the market today, and often with much smaller file-sizes too.
The advantage of encoding directly to h.264 is that you can capture directly into relatively tiny files compared to intermediate and lossless codecs, allowing you to transmit your video much more quickly. Indeed, the file sizes are so small in comparison that you can record directly to an attached flash drive (USB CPU overhead permitting).

A photograph of Expresscard-HDMI - not a mock-up or CG model, this is the actual production sample currently in test and used to bring you the images on this page.

Digital Foundry prides itself on providing the highest quality capture solutions for video games professionals, and while this is most likely the smallest HDMI capture card around, there is no loss of quality. These shots give an indication of the quality level you can get using the lossless capturing mode of our recommended software.

Lossless video captures of Gran Turismo 5’s replay mode, captured using Expresscard-HDMI hardware. Despite the miniature size of the card, quality matches equivalent desktop offerings.

Just how good is the real-time h.264 encoding? The beauty of using x264 is that you can control a substantial amount of parameters in the encoding process. In the case of our testing with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, we could capture 720p at 30 frames per second at CRF 23 with no frame-loss, even on the most demanding video, all the while running a full-screen 60Hz preview window. The more powerful your notebook, the more compression features you can utilise, making the files smaller still. Alternatively you can aim for a higher quality level.
CPU time required varies according to the amount of work x264 needs to carry out when encoding each frame. The best way to stress the encoder is to choose fast action 60Hz games with a lot going on and plenty of colour splashed on the screen. Housemarque’s Super Stardust HD is one of the most difficult to compress video games around: here’s how it looks using our x264 real-time encoding:

Click through for the full images of real-time h.264 compressed video captured with the new Expresscard-HDMI offering from Digital Foundry.

Pricing and release date are yet to be confirmed, but the product is ready and the drivers are complete and testing is now taking place. After our experience with our previous tech (the analogue component based Expresscard-HD which we never put into full production), it is safe to say that while Expresscard is a standard the card fully conforms to, notebook manufacturers can find it rather more difficult: the Santa Rosa-era Core 2 Duo notebooks of Dell are NOT recommended (XPS M1330/M1530 for example) while the technologically like-for-like laptops from ASUS proved to be ideal testbeds for Expresscard-HDMI and worked perfectly. We are confident of compatibility across the range on newer i3/i5/i7 notebooks.

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Digital Foundry: First Again with Stereo 3D HDMI 1.4 Support

June 30th, 2010

Digital Foundry is extremely proud and excited to announce that its TrueHD product has now been upgraded to support the new HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D protocols for gameplay. We were first with direct capture support for the 1080p60 HDMI standard, and the experience that made this possible made the support for stereo 3D relatively painless to add.
This means that TrueHD is the first - and currently only - system available right now capable of acquiring the PS3’s bespoke stereo 3D output at the full frame-rate, when attached to a debug or “TEST” development console.
So, what form does the stereo 3D output take? Basically two 720p frames (one per eye) are incorporated into one 1280×1470 image, with 30 lines of black separating the two views. Here’s a couple of direct shots taken from a TrueHD capture session.

Click through for the full images. They’re actually derived from CineForm-encoded footage, though the customary lossless 24-bit RGB codecs are supported for those who simply must have a pixel-perfect dump of the HDMI port. The top image is for the left eye, the bottom for the right.

Obviously this is video capture quite a step apart from anything we’ve done before, and while we support 1280×1470 as a direct capture option, this frame setup is completely divorced from current editing workflows. So just how do you integrate this into your existing editing set-up?
Thankfully, the world leaders in high definition compression, CineForm, have been working on 3D video editing tools for a long time now and the HDMI 1.4 standard has now been integrated directly into both their world-beating encoder and workflow products: CineForm NEO-4K has all the 3D tools required to make full stereo 3D editing a reality, while NEO-3D offers the additional function of keyframing for convergence dissolves. Both packages also include CineForm FirstLight, allowing you to manipulate and colour-grade your captures on the fly using active metadata - staggeringly useful features.
The addition of the HDMI 1.4 stereo 3D support should also mean that TrueHD now becomes a viable platform for NVIDIA 3D Vision capture thanks to the firm’s release of the 3DTV Play package - something we’ll be testing out once the support is complete.
The final icing on the cake? Existing TrueHD users will be able to upgrade the hardware side of the equation for free, though users with CineForm NEO-HD licenses will need to arrange an upgrade to the NEO-4K or NEO-3D packages. CineForm itself tends to offer full “trade-in” value on the existing license, so the upgrade should be cheap and painless.

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Modern Warfare 2 Trailer Created with TrueHD Hardware

August 10th, 2009

Earlier in the year, we were contacted by Infinity Ward - the creators of the Call of Duty franchise - with a view to outfitting their new media suite with TrueHD hardware. As you might expect, the team had a number of technical requirements that involved some tweaks to our tools, not least of which was beta support for capture of AC3 and DTS surround sound audio.
Now, with the marketing campaign for the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in full effect, it’s great to see our hardware being deployed in creating promotional material for what many believe will be this year’s top-selling video game. Here is the first of the trailers engineered by Infinity Ward in-house using TrueHD hardware.

Infinity Ward is looking to create the most pristine assets available, and that being the case, they opted to use the unique lossless 24-bit RGB capture modes used by TrueHD, which captures and encodes gameplay footage at up to 1080p at 60fps. In this case, their game outputs 720p, so there was no need to use the top-end.
After this, the footage was taken into Adobe Premiere Pro where it was edited into the presentation above. Editing can be carried out in real-time, and again, using the lossless codecs supported by TrueHD, absolutely ZERO video quality is lost no matter how many times the footage is processed and exported.
While the asset has so far only been deployed in streaming web applications at 30fps, having the pristine lossless video available allows it to be used for presentation and event scenarios where the quality is literally idential to the game running the action itself.
In short, from start to finish, it’s a video that could only have been completed to this most highest of standards by using Digital Foundry hardware.

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