Badaboom Comes Out of Beta

We haven’t talked much about Badaboom in the past, but it’s one application NVIDIA’s riding on to help improve the likability of CUDA. Because GPUs consist of highly parallel processors, certain tasks can be handled much faster on your graphics card – much faster than the fastest Quad-Core CPU. The issue right now seems to be based on what you can do on a GPU, or rather, what you can’t do, but video encoding is a definite reality.

Badaboom is designed for the mobile user, and outputs to a maximum resolution of 720p, or 1280×720. It supports all CUDA-capable NVIDIA cards and can utilize a variety of input video formats, but outputs to only a single one, H.264 MP4. Given the application is targeting mobile users though, there’s probably nothing wrong with that, since the iPod, PSP and other devices have great support for the format.

For input files, MPEG2, H.264, RAW AVI, HDV and DVDs are supported, which opens up quite a bit of possibilities. You can rip either your own DVD’s or recode downloaded content to better fit the smaller screen. Right now, there is only one version of the application (there were originally supposed to be two), which costs $29.99. We’ll be giving the program a hard test in the coming weeks, so we’ll let you know just what to expect from it once in your hands.

Priced at $29.99, the Badaboom Media Converter features a sleek, point-and-click interface that makes formatting video for devices such as an Apple iPod, Sony PlayStation Portable, or Xbox 360 simple and intuitive. Most video converters available to consumers use the CPU, where each video frame is broken into parts and processed serially. Powered by the RapiHD™ Video Platform, Badaboom taps the up to 240 stream processors in current NVIDIA GPUs to render entire frames at once, dramatically reducing encoding time and efficiently using the PC’s entire system resources.