Badaboom Media Converter v1.1.1

Badaboom Gets Updated

Back in November of 2008 I wrote an article about how to use Badaboom v1.0 to convert DVD movies to play on my BlackBerry Bold smart phone. Over the past three months Elemental Technologies has updated their Badaboom Media Converter not once, but twice, and the changes have made the utility much more powerful and user friendly. In December 2008 Badaboom Media Converter v1.1 was released and it featured support for additional input file formats and containers (DivX, Xvid, MPEG-1, VC-1, AAC Audio, AVI, and MKV), new output profiles (YouTube, Blackberry Bold and Microsoft Zune), user-customizable outputs, H.264 profile output and last, but not least, 1920×1080 (1080p) output support. Without increasing the price tag one penny the features of the utility got a nice little jolt, which doesn’t happen too often.

Just yesterday Elemental Technologies released a second update to Badaboom Media Converter with release v1.1.1. This version fixes 12 bugs and also adds new features like FRAPS support for gamers that record demos and a new 960×540 resolution for Apple TV users. Legit Reviews asked Elemental Technologies to think about including FRAPS support in December as I thought that gamers and enthusiasts would see a value in being able to easily record and format movies for social networking sites like YouTube. It is a great feeling to see your ideas come to life, so let’s take a look at the latest version of Badaboom Media Converter!

The Badaboom Media Converter was developed by Elemental Technologies and NVIDIA to format video and audio files for a variety of devices. This software requires the use of a CUDA-compatible NVIDIA graphics card, but you might be in luck as millions of cards can run CUDA applications. For a list of these GPUs, please see this NVIDIA site to see if your card is supported. If it is, then you can run Badaboom, which performs the core transcoding functions on the GPU rather than the CPU. The original Badaboom Media Converter v1.0 interface can be seen above, and while it received good reviews it was criticized for having inaccurate video/audio bitrate sliders and a poorly estimated file size. Elemental Technologies has spent a ton of time fine-tuning the video and audio bitrate sliders and the algorithm for the estimated output file size, and both are now more accurate.

This morning I re-installed Badaboom Media Converter v1.0 and converted the movie Lara Croft Tomb Raider so I can watch it on my phone for an upcoming trip that I am taking. The BlackBerry Bold 9000 has a half-VGA (480×320 pixels) resolution thanks to the great Transmissive TFT LCD display the phone has, but Badaboom V1.0 could only do an output resolution of 320×320 with the settings available in the program. It took just under 13 minutes to transcode the 760 MB output movie at a bit rate of 1000bkit on my PC consisting of an Intel Core 2 QX9650 processor and an XFX GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card.