Badaboom: A Full Test of Elemental's GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcoder

Source Limitations

We've finally got a GPU accelerated video transcoding application, let's transcode some video then, shall we? Not so fast.

Badaboom lacks full Blu-ray support, despite Elemental listing .m2ts files on its supported list. Badaboom won’t decrypt a Blu-ray disc for you so you’ll have to rely on AnyDVD HD to strip out the content protection; unfortunately once you have, you’ll either be met with a crash upon trying to convert the content or an unusable output file.

This happens a lot if you're trying to transcode a DivX file or Blu-ray m2ts

With Blu-ray support out of the question for the initial release, I turned to plain old DVDs, after all that’s what most people have these days. Thankfully DVD support is much better with Badaboom, albeit far from flawless.

While I could transcode my copy of Bad Boys just fine (and ended up using it for most of the benchmarks), attempting to transcode Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi left me with an unusable output file. The source movie was recorded at 24 fps but the transcoded file was a 22 fps movie, resulting in the movie playing back smoothly, but slowly.

DivX support was pretty much hit or miss. While some videos would transcode just fine, others would crash the program. Elemental told us that DivX support is spotty at this point, so the behavior wasn’t unexpected.

Input audio formats are also very limited - only MPEG-1 Layer II and PCM are supported, there’s no support for AAC, MP3, DD/DTS or anything else.

And that’s just the list of issues with various formats we’re trying to transcode...

Functional Limitations

When I first spoke to Elemental about the limitations in the early beta of Badaboom I looked at a couple of months ago, I was told that the professional version would answer a lot of my complaints - offering customizable resolutions, bit rates and more.

In playing around with the review copy I found myself frustrated, once more, by the lack of customization options offered by the program, but I figured the pro-version would fix everything. Until it turned out that what I was reviewing was the professional version.

This table should help explain the differences between the standard and professional versions:

You can’t set custom resolutions in either version, you’re left with the predefined resolutions that Elemental ships with the program. The standard version is limited to 720 x 576 while the pro version will go up to 1920 x 1080. I’ve also had problems where Badaboom will insert a thin black border around the video and slightly squish the aspect ratio when upscaling video.

Those are all of the resolution options you get

The maximum bitrate supported by Badaboom is 5Mbps if you select the AppleTV, Xbox 360 or PS3 profile, there’s no way to define a custom profile - you have to modify an existing one. The lack of full Blu-ray support at this point means that the 5Mbps cap isn’t a huge deal but the combination of the two severely limits the usefulness of the application.

The only output format is .mp4, encoded using the Baseline H.264 profile - there’s no support for the main or high profiles of the codec. Combined with the 5Mbps bitrate cap this isn’t too bad, but again it limits the usefulness of the application.

You don't get a full implementation of the H.264 codec, only the Baseline profile with hardware levels up to 3.1

Transcoding a movie? There’s no way to keep Dolby Digital or DTS audio tracks, the only audio output format supported by Badaboom is AAC. Thankfully you can get multi-channel AAC but that’s it. Elemental is working on getting a DD license.

Ten points to the first person to apply a Bad Boys quote to this limited list of supported inputs/outputs

If you look at the laundry list of options you can set when encoding a video using x264 you’ll see that Badaboom comes quite ill-equipped. While I appreciate the simplicity of the interface, the “advanced” button should allow for much more customization than it actually does.