NVIDIA Purevideo Interview

Introduction

Last month, we had a chat with ATI about their video initiatives. This week, we're sitting down with Scott Vouri of NVIDIA to hear what they have to say about PureVideo. As in the previous interview, we sent NVIDIA a list of questions by email. They had a chance to reply and then we've added the "last word." If you only read one question, jump to page 7 and read about NVIDIA's technology to minimize LCD ghosting..

FiringSquad: Why don’t you tell our readers about yourself? i.e. What do you do for NVIDIA, how long have you been working there, what was the greatest achievement you’ve seen at NVIDIA, and the biggest mistake at NVIDIA you’ve seen.

Scott Vouri: My name is Scott Vouri and I’m General Manager of Multimedia for NVIDIA. My group is responsible for NVIDIA’s digital home products and initiatives such as our PureVideo technology, MCE and other home theater products. My home set-up is a HP Digital Entertainment Center with a silent, half-height MSI GeForce 6600 HD, PureVideo Decoder and a prototype NVIDIA dual tuner driving a Sony 36HS420 HD CRT Monitor. While I’ve only been working here 15 months, the greatest thing I have been part of is NVIDIA’s re-taking of the high-end of the pixel processing market. From SLI to PureVideo it has been a fun ride. Biggest mistake I’ve seen was not educating the public sooner on NVIDIA’s video technology leadership position.

FiringSquad: The PureVideo brand-name seems to attached to the following technologies:
1. Capture of the source (NVTV, Dual TV)
2. Video processing on the GPU

(compute offload: MPEG-2, H.264)

(quality enhancements: deinterlacing, LCD overdrive)
3. Software (nstant Media, MPEG-2 decoder)
Are we missing anything?

Scott Vouri: PureVideo is NVIDIA’s unique hardware and software technology for advanced video processing. You probably remember from the GeForce 7800GTX launch back in June, we described how we implemented that technology at all stages of the video pipeline from 3D Comb Filter, Noise Reduction and Weak Signal Amplification technology on NVIDIA TV tuner products to HD and SD broadcast quality compositing, previewing and output on NVIDIA Professional Solutions products. The video processing power our engineers have delivered in every GPU since the GeForce 6x series is truly phenomenal. There are three dedicated video processing cores separate from the 3D rendering engine in every GPU - an MPEG decoding engine, a programmable video processor with its own video programming language, and a motion estimation engine. On top of the video processing cores we have a huge set of microcode which implements our advanced algorithms for MPEG2, WMV and H.264 HD content decode acceleration, Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing of HD and SD content, Hardware Scaling, Inverse Telecine (3:2 & 2:2 Pulldown correction), and Bad Edit Correction. Then on top of the microcode is our PureVideo driver set and of course the PureVideo Decoder. Finally our TV-Out capabilities provide high quality Composite, S-Video, Component, DVI, HDMI and SDI outputs.

[Alan's comments: So in essence, it's everything I've said but with the addition of considering the various video outputs as part of PureVideo. On paper, they're targeting the same "from capture to display" pipeline that ATI AVIVO is]

FiringSquad: Which of those PureVideo features are available on MacOS?

Scott Vouri:Hardware accelerated content decoding, de-interlacing, scaling, LCD sharpening and TV output via DVI, S/Video and CVBS .