MainConcept GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DivX, Inc. announced today the immediate availability of its first graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated H.264/AVC Encoder.

The new encoder SDK was developed using the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture that enables increases in performance by harnessing hundreds of cores inside NVIDIA GPUs. A key advantage of solutions based on this encoder is they run today on the installed base of 200+ million CUDA-enabled GPUs.

CUDA transcoding speeds up the time-consuming task of converting movies into the H.264/AVC format, and also reduces CPU utilization so the computer can be used for other purposes while encoding.

MainConcept is providing software developers with an SDK to add NVIDIA GPU-accelerated transcoding to their own solutions. The MainConcept CUDA H.264/AVC Encoder SDK allows transcoding from MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264/AVC elementary streams, and raw frames into the H.264/AVC Baseline and Main Profile formats. It also offers many features found in the company's software H.264/AVC. Using the MainConcept CUDA Encoder, the whole H.264/AVC transcoding process is done on GPUs, leaving only entropy encoding for processing on the CPU.

The MainConcept CUDA H.264/AVC Encoder is available today and is compatible with any NVIDIA graphics solution supporting the CUDA architecture 1.0 for transcoding. For a complete list, visit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html.