I really appreciate you posting your notes here. Badaboom was the *first thing* I tried when I got the new drivers installed because the thought of faster encodings was like a fantasty to me (I’m on a dual-core 3.0ghz E6850, it’s not terrible, but jesus I wish it was faster).

The only problem I had when I fired up the trial is that I didn’t have any media on my machine that the thing could encode… it won’t rip DVDs (for obvious reasons), it doesn’t understand how to re-encode h.264 files and that was all I had handy to try.

I’m surprised to hear that the result of your tests were unplayable files… do you have other types of files or examples that you could try out to see if they work? I’m really not clear on what the “optimal” use-case is for these “legit” file conversion utilities… normally that area of software is stymied quite a bit of copyright and usually seen as something only pirates do, I have yet to meet a piece of software that I didn’t find short-coming in this area. They all sorta do their own thing, and each one has it’s ups and downs.

The Badaboom file was a fraction of the size, at around 80MB, whereas Videora’s size was 220MB (the original .avi was 350MB). I didn’t play around w/ Videora enough to match it’s conversion settings to Badaboom so I can get a better comparison, I just wanted to see what the defaults would do. But anyway Badaboom’s file wouldn’t play! Videora’s played fine of course.

So for I’m not impressed but maybe I’ll play around w/ Badaboom more later. Next up I’m going to try Folding@home.