Is there a free version of Badaboom available? By free I mean a version that is not time limited. The ATI Stream-enabled Avivo transcoding is free with the latest drivers. Why shouldn’t I expect the same from nVidia? The only version I can find on the net anywhere is on the Elemental Technologies’ site. This is free-if-you-pay-after-30-days-or-30-transcodes which really isn’t free at all.
No, there is not a free CUDA-accelerated H.264 encoder (a la Badaboom). Though it would be nice to have one, I don’t think that nVidia should be required to provide free CUDA-enabled apps for everything. Beyond some core libraries (CUBLAS, CUFFT), the SDK exists so that others can code for the platform as well. For example, Cyberlink’s PowerDirector software provides CUDA-accelerated encoding for H.264 and various flavors of MPEG.
Summary: The reason you shouldn’t expect the same from nVidia is because they shouldn’t have to provide an unlimited supply of free software when you buy your card. It would be nice, but remember that a good chunk of the price that you paid for your card went towards the R&D and production costs. Should they use every last bit of the leftover money to finance the development costs of CUDA apps? Or should they use the profit to keep the company in business, like every other business in the world does?
i see your logic there. oh wait no, because they are seperate companies. if one CD shop has buy one get one free on a cd you want you cant go to another shop and demand they sell it buy one get one free also.