Avisynth in our hardware?

I was thinking.... If it is possible to make hardware mpeg encoders, video effects etc... Then would it not be possible to add Avisynth and the scripts into the chips of a card? Maybe 'flash' it into the chips? Then we could run our scripts in real time, right? Or am I completely wrong, here? Just an idea, I have no expierence with things like that. Fred.

no it can be done, it's been done for years in computer vision for industrial quality check process when computer weren't fast enough to process images at the speed required. Using fpga on a pci card is a possibility, but i believe you're a billionaire who can afford the developpement of such devices. And you'll need to "translate" in hardware all the filters, which can limit the number of filters, or using some powerpc core that you can find in FPGA nowadays (xilink virtex-II), but still, you'll need to rewrite the filters for this architecture. Nothing is impossible, you just need peoples, time and money (a lot ;))

hehe... i'm waiting for Cell processors to hit the mainstream. we could do everything in software and have enough brute force left to play doom3. i'd love a machine fast enough to do SDI in, then process (ivtc, or regular PAL conversion), then either encode or play out through SDI to some other device. that would be the dog's bollocks :) but once we've got that kind of speed, HDTV will have provided an even bigger hurdle :)

Should be possible. Build a DS graph in graphedit, put ffdshow in the chain, and configure its AviSynth section.

Wouldn't it be less expensive and less of a headache to speed AviSynth up via a network render farm ? In the case of a DVD rip, I could see a single VOB being sent to a single render node for processing, then sent back to the central manager for final authoring. Let's say 5 machines x $700.00 per machine =$3500 That used to be the cost of an 4.77Mhz IBM PC back in the day :)

From what I've seen till now, programming an FPGA using VHDL or Verilog seems somewhat easier to me than doing the same stuff on a GPU, but well...everybody do what he wants...

It's not that hard to program a GPU and the good thing is that it is relatively cheap compaired to the processing power it delivers. I think it mostly would be the floating point calculation heavy filters that will penefit from GPU acceleration like vague denoise and the fft based. But it could be great with a avisynth version for xbox 2 or PS3.

Ok, as you like. Just want to let you know that for having a working FPGA you need 1. VHDL, 2. Verilog or 3. System C /Handel C. If people were willingly buying some PCI Express board with a couple of FPGA and some Memory that could be easily done for less than what a powerfull GPU costs. A one million gates FPGA can get really chep when you exceed the magic number of 50,000 units.These beasts run at about 200 Mhz and can give you a blazingly fast processing speed.Not to mention that you have full paralellism. But as usual, do whatever you want.

But in the mean time... What can we do to improve speed? Setmemorymax(128) helps a little. Not runnig anything in the background also helps a little. Any other tricks? Fred.

you can squeeze a bit more speed using avs2avi instead of virtualdub. also, use the speed optimised versions of any plugins that have them (like LeakKernelDeint instead of KernelDeint, FFTGPU instead of FFT3dfilter), and try to keep the scripts tight and simple, with a minimum of slowness happening.