Matrox CompressHD: The First “I want that” of 2009

DCP by Jan Ozer

Matrox’s CompresHD is the first product that I looked at this year and said “I want that.” It’s a $495 H.264 accelerator card based upon an Amberella chip that you can buy standalone, or will appear in various iterations of Matrox’s popular MXO products. The product integrates with Compressor on the Mac, and Adobe Media Encoder on Windows (but not on the Mac, at least for the first iteration). It accelerates only H.264 encoding, whether for Apple devices, Blu-ray or general streaming.

I saw a demo on the Mac, and I think it will have its greatest success there, at least in the short term. You control the product from Compressor, where it can work either as an integrated codec or like a QuickTime export component. If you use it as a codec, Compressor’s own scaling and deinterlacing functions apply, which his useful if you want to use your old presets and just accelerate encoding. read more...