HEXUS.lifestyle's standing-on-a-high-horse specialist Bob Crabtree gives his jaundiced take on the latest developments with Avivo - ATI's much-touted, next-generation video decoding, encoding and deinterlacing technology

Today, you can have nourishing, toasted wholemeal bread with a smidgeon or two of caviar. And that's good, isn't it? But believe us when we tell you that, some time soon, things will far better still - with lashings of the black stuff spread on top. For some of you. Probably.

Call us cynical but that, we feel, is one way to interpret ATI's words and actions in recent months and up to the present relating to Avivo – the company's much-touted, next-generation video decoding, encoding and deinterlacing technology. There's been a lot of Avivo-related bluster coming out of ATI for a good while and our recent hands-on using the first Avivo-enabled (but non-certified) drivers confirm this to be the case, so check out the hard facts that underlie this commentary - Rys's warts-and-all, and by-the-numbers, ATI Avivo Winter 2005 Update.

Avivo is available only to purchasers of the newly-launched X1000 range of graphics cards. In the main, these are produced by ATI's partners but ATI itself also sells an own-brand All-in-Wonder X1800 XL graphics-card/digital-TV-tuner combination. Avivo's success looks to be critical to ATI's own because it will be a key selling-point on all new graphics cards coming out of that camp for the foreseeable future.

Exactly what you need
ATI is telling the world that, with Avivo, it is offering graphics-card products that are better suited than those from any competitor for PC use in the world of high-definition video and TV - and video streaming around-the-house and from off the internet.

The requirement is for the graphics card to allow a computer to play back high bitrate, full-resolution (but cunningly-compressed) HD video without stressing its CPU and without dropping any frames. In the absence of such a helping hand, the CPU has to do the decoding itself. Even the fastest CPUs can struggle to play footage created at the highest of resolutions and data rates with the compression method set to be used for a wide range of commonly-viewed high-definition source - the H.264 AVC Codec (and others of its ilk).

Being able to handle what tomorrow brings also means providing the ability to speedily, seamlessly and intelligently transcode footage between a wide range of video types - for playing over home networks and on a variety of handheld devices.

Further, this widely-shared vision of a world full of Windows Vista/Media Center PCs (and some Mac equivalents, superiors or inferiors) anticipates that all this good stuff will be shown in knock-out quality on non-interlaced computer displays. And that's only possible if there's minimal degradation when footage that was originally created for viewing on interlaced TV sets is de-interlaced as it's being played out.

Into the world naked
Members of the X1000-family of cards have only been on sale for a little while but all came into the world nearly naked - unable to do a number of the significant things of which Avivo is supposed to be capable.

This is what the cards lacked when first launched (and what the new drivers and software try to put right):

* An H.264 decoder along with associated DirectX video acceleration (DXVA) and a DirectShow interface for the decoder
* Support, with standard-definition video, for methods of motion-adaptive deinterlacing and cadence detection, as mentioned in ATI's white paper
* The ability to transcode video from one format to another – whether using ATI's own app or third-party software that takes advantage of ATI's DirectShow filters

It's almost as though ATI reasoned - having had a recent track record of delayed product launches - that it was better to get out the X1000 family roughly on time and incomplete, rather than being late once more. In fact that almost certainly was the thinking. The company, we reckon, was desperate to get product into the retail channel in time to catch some of the lucrative pre-Christmas business. As ever, accountants rule when it comes to big-company decision making.

So, until now, those cards that have been sold have lacked even the first dabs of luxury topping. And these toppings (as per the bullet-list above) are only turning up on December 22 when the drivers that Rys tested (and which are now certified) come available for download.

But, disappointingly, even if further iterations of drivers and software do deliver all the promised toppings – and soon - it looks as though one or more will only be dished out to buyers of expensive, range-leading X1000-family cards.

Specifically - and contrary to our original understanding of Avivo (an understanding based on what ATI has written and said) - we've been told that certain cards will have limitations in their ability to decode HD footage fast enough to play back the video without dropping frames.

For instance, a low-end X1300 card that Rys looked at, we've now been told, isn't supposed to be able to decode even a 720p H.264 AVC stream.

But, actually, it turns out that's not absolutely accurate. In testing with the new drivers, Rys discovered that the X1300 could successfully play a 720p H.264 AVC stream - and easily - but only at relatively low bitrates. So, ATI has now described to us a worse-case scenario, presumably to avoid criticism that it is still over-inflating capabilities.

Rys will be running some more detailed tests, the better to pinpoint what footage will and won't be okay with non-range-leading cards - and we'll let you know the numbers. But we are left disappointed and frustrated that ATI seems to have changed its tune about Avivo - now saying that some of its most desirable features will only be available to those willing and able to pay out for the most expensive cards. That's certainly not our understanding of how things were supposed to be.

And it means, potentially, ATI is shooting itself in the foot. It seems to us unlikely that the company and its partners are going to be able to generate massive sales volumes in the high-def digital home PC sector if the only ATI cards that can trusted to fully do the job are those carrying a price considerably higher than the mass market is prepared to pay.

It's quite possible that things will change with subsequent generations of card (these can be expected to be cheaper, too) but you'll not catch us promising you range-wide top-notch Avivo capabilities on ATI's behalf. How could we when, as seems to be the case, lower-end first-generation products will remain many bricks short of a load and when the company's original pitch didn't make clear that Avivo-related functions – just as expected with the more usual video-card features – will only be truly remarkable if you buy in at the top of the family hierarchy?

As Rys has pointed out, although Avivo transcodes very quickly, it only transcodes a limited range of formats. This ability is important in systems that are intended to feed footage out over home networks or for transfer onto handheld devices. Once the improved variety of supported Codecs that ATI is promising becomes a reality "real soon", we'll be carrying out in-depth tests. What we'll be doing is seeing if lower-end cards, as well as high, benefit from the improved variety of supported Codecs or whether they're hamstrung in this capability, too.

But, right now, what's our bottom line? Well, we believe that, with Avivo, ATI has very accurately identified the next-generation capabilities required from graphics cards - and that in itself is worthy of some considerable applause. But what we also believe is that the company should pause for a moment and take a close look in the mirror – the better to see itself as others do.

Our perception is of a company that found it necessary to generate a smokescreen of hype to try to cover up the fact that it was struggling to sort out its drivers and software in time for the planned launch date. From the first day that Avivo cards hit the street, they should have delivered (across-the-board, we believe) - what PCs in the video-centric digital home of tomorrow (and today) need. After all, these are the things that ATI itself identified as necessary and promised to incorporate - and which we can only hope it will be providing some time soon.