The news coverage of the Badaboom alpha software release continues…

June 17th from Computer Shopper search for Badaboom:

 We tested the GPU processing by converting a video for the iPhone first with Sony Vegas 8.0, and then with the BadaBOOM GPU-based converter supplied by nVidia.  On a quad-core, 3.2Ghz Core 2 Extreme QX9770, our sample MPEG2 video took 42 seconds to convert to iPhone H.264 format using the CPU and Vegas 8.0.  Using a preliminary version of BadaBOOM to convert the file using the GPU, the same file converted in just 27 seconds.  The difference will be even more dramatic on slower CPUs or processors with fewer cores, where the CPU conversion will take much longer-but the GPU version should remain around 27 seconds.  (BadaBOOM should be commercially available in August.)

June 18th from tgdaily an editors opinion column discussing GPU vs. CPU performance here are a couple of quotes:

But both the creation and sharing of video and its transmission over existing networks require a lot of real-time video compression, which comes down to the real-time transcoding of high definition video into more compressed video types.  Even if you are running one program at a time Nvidia told me that a video that typically might take 2.5 hours to transcode, may only take a little over 30 minutes with their fastest cards.  I’m dying to see if thats true, but even a 50% improvement would be worth the trouble in my opinion.

I am looking forward to the improvements in transcoding because I’m constantly putting videos on my Zune for trips and I would love to be able to do that much more quickly given the fact that I typically wait until the last moment to remember to do this.

June 23 from APC a brief mention of Badaboom:

Thanks to NVIDIA’s new CUDA software, a range of applications are soon going to be tapping into the specialised processing abilities of NVIDIA’s cards in ways that will make your CPU seem positively pathetic.  iPod users will appreciate Elemental Technologies’ BadaBOOM Media Converter.  Due in August, it allows video transcoding via the GPU which is eighteen times faster than today’s CPU based method.