VentureBeat

As I write this, I’m waiting for a long upload to YouTube to finish. It’s taking forever. If you’ve ever tried to move a movie or home video from a computer to a portable device, you know the feeling. That’s what Badaboom is for.

Elemental Technologies is launching its Badaboom Media Converter today as a tool that can quickly convert video so that it can be transferred faster from a computer to another gadget. The cool thing about it is that it doesn’t require a special custom video chip to do this. Rather, Elemental’s software taps the unused power of the graphics chip, the Nvidia GPU (graphics processing unit) with the CUDA programming language.

For a couple of years, Nvidia has been designing graphics chips that allow any untapped power to be used to run general-purpose programs. Badaboom is one of a wave of applications that Nvidia is supporting as part of a visual computing ecosystem. Nvidia actually invested in Elemental in order to get the company off the ground.

Portland, Ore.-based Elemental was formed in August 2006 by a team of former engineers at chip maker Pixelworks in Oregon. Sam Blackman, chief executive of Elemental, saw how tough it was to create custom video chips and decided to explore the CUDA alternative. Rather than create a chip, his team created software to run on the graphics chip, a much cheaper alternative that could accomplish the same thing as a custom chip.

Elemental created its first prototype in 2007. The software could decode an MPEG-2 video stream (one of the older but most popular video formats) and got tremendous performance results. The team has now produced a software-based H.264 encoder (based on one of the newest, most efficient video formats), which can take high-definition video and convert it to any format in a much shorter time than other solutions. Blackman said it runs about 18 times faster than iTunes at converting H.264 video.

The H.264 encoder can take a two-hour movie and convert it in maybe 15 or 20 minutes, provided your computer has a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU. If you did this on a machine that used the Intel microprocessor, it would take 45 minutes to an hour. On top of that, your machine would slow to a crawl. By contrast, since Badaboom uses the GPU only, you can use your computer to do other things as the conversion happens in the background.

The software is available as a free download. If you want to buy the permanent version, it costs $29.99. You can use it to convert home movies from DVDs so that they can run on a mobile phone, an iPod, a PlayStation Portable, an iPhone or a video player. The company also launched a professional version of the software, RapiHD, for video professionals last week. Blackman said he hopes that software will be used in broadcast video editing, replacing expensive equipment.

Thanks to the launches, Elemental will now be generating revenue. The software is distributed as a free trial with Nvidia’s GPU products. Blackman is working with add-on card makers to get them to bundle it with graphics cards for PCs.

Elemental has 16 employees, far fewer than it would need if it were making custom video chips. It has raised $7.1 million to date in funding from Nvidia, Voyager Capital, General Catalyst Partners and angels. Blackman said that he tapped a friend at Nvidia to make an introduction, and the graphics chip company invested after Elemental proved its technology could work.

Competitors include software programs from Nero and Roxio, as well as iTunes itself. There is also an open-source converter called X264. Blackman says all of those products are much slower than Badaboom. Over time, Elemental will work on more converters which can convert different video formats.

I can remember the first interview I did with Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, back when the company was coming out of stealth in 1995. Since 3-D games didn’t exist back then, Huang described his graphics chip as the ideal “Windows accelerator.” And if you remember those days, Windows needed a lot of help. Then came no less than 50 3-D graphics startups. They all came and went. Nvidia remains.

The company’s newest cell phone processors have more power than that PC graphics chip from 1995. And state of the art graphics processors can recreate a human head in uncanny detail, from the 5 o’clock shadow on a man’s face to the way light scatters underneath the skin and makes it glow.

Now the company is the big kahuna of graphics. It still faces Advanced Micro Devices, which bought ATI Technologies, and Intel is now moving into graphics chips. But now it’s Nvidia’s turn to encourage startups in the field of visual computing. Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to use the horsepower of the latest graphics chips to create rich applications from scientific computing to visual imagery from professional artists who are recognized by the nonprofit digital art group CG Society.

About 60 of those companies will talk about their plans at Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit, which takes place Aug. 26-27 in San Jose, during the Nvision 08 conference Aug. 25-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvision 08 is Nvidia’s first major conference, featuring everything from a professional gaming tournament to a speech by Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment. The companies that will talk at the conference all fit into the tracks of visual computing, gaming, lifestyle computing, and high-performance computing based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language. Over the years, Nvidia has invested in companies that exploit graphics, such as Keyhole, the satellite imagery company that was acquired by Google, which turned the application into Google Earth. Emerging companies scheduled to participate include Acceleware, Cooliris, Elemental Technologies, Emergent Game Technologies, MotionDSP, NaturalMotion, and Right Hemisphere.

“We’ve come to realize that visual computing is a platform in its own right,” Herbst said. “Without this ecosystem, our hardware won’t get used the way it should be.”

Calisa Cole, vice president of corporate communications, says that the time has come for these twin conferences because startups are plentiful and the benefits of visual computing are all around us. Our cars are better designed, digital movies are easier to edit, baby ultrasounds are clearer than ever, and bone scan results come back quicker.

Nvidia’s chips (as well as AMD’s) are the foundation for the visual computing ecosystem, including game developers such as Epic Games, which makes games such as the upcoming “Gears of War 2” as well as engines for graphics that game startups use to get into the business. There are hardware and software companies with applications ranging from airplane design to medical research to special effects animation.

Company conferences are starting to supercede industry-wide events in the tech industry. In a way, Nvidia is taking a page from the playbook of its biggest rival, Intel, which holds a variety of “Intel Developer Forum” (Aug. 19-21 at Moscone Center West) events to encourage an ecosystem around Intel products. It’s interesting that Nvidia’s first big event comes under a shadow; Nvidia reported a lousy quarter, which included a $200 million write-off related to technical problems with how its graphics chips are affixed to notebook computers. But Nvidia hopes that this era of visual computing will begin to overshadow the era of the microprocessor. The battle between Nvidia and Intel is just starting to heat up.

Speakers at the conferences include luminaries such as Jeff Han, the pioneer of multi-touch displays who was named one of Time magazine’s 100-most-influential people last year. Conference titles include “How We Crammed a Black Hole, a Star Cluster, and Turbulent Plasma into a GPU (and Live to Tell About It).” And for entertainment, there is the pro-gaming tournament and an evening music concert and light show dubbed “Video Games Live.” An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to attend Nvision 08, while several hundred are expected at the Emerging Companies Summit.