Quote Originally Posted by AndrewSeabrook View Post
Recording Codecs. What most miss in the discussion about codecs is that they, in the main, have to be licenced, and therefore add to the cost of the product. Also as the codecs are updated, so there is an increased resource load on the development teams to test and modify their code to support the new codecs. Each of the companies makes a commercial decision about the codecs that they will bundle and support into their product.

Your point about CPU use is valid. WC and vMix take a lot of advantage of the GPU, whilst VB primarily targets the CPU. The VB chromakey module uses both CPU and GPU resources.
The statement on codecs is not necessarily true. In Wirecast's case, it is able to access any Quicktime codec installed on the system and write a file to that codec in real time. Telestream does not have to pay any money to license these codecs as they are available system wide. So the argument that codecs must be licensed and tested is really non sensical in the case of Wirecast, as the user can use any codec they wish (and the developer of the codec will have tested it in another QT app where it will work the same). On the Mac version of Wirecast users can get Apple's ProRes codec for free - http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1396

As for the comment about GPU use, I think the "takes a lot of advantage of the GPU" is kind of disingenuous. Both of them exclusively process the images on the GPU, as there is no other way to do it. Wirecast is an OpenGL app and VMix is either OpenGL or DirectX. If you watched Tim Jenison's interview with Leo Laporte you'd also note that the TriCaster uses OpenGL for processing. From years of using these products, I can comfortably say that this is the only way that a computer based switcher can work. VMix Wirecast seem able to output pretty solid frame rate video, stack layer after layer of video all in real time . The CPU should only really be used to handle the encoding, playback of media, audio mixing etc.

Joe