CyberLink MediaShow—they love GPUs
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Discuss
Categories:
Software Review
Tags:
apple
facebook
microsoft
media
flickr
faces
cyberlink
photo
recognition
CyberLink has been at the forefront of GPU exploitation for photos, and their latest effort is MediaShow. YAPP—yet another photo program, but this time it’s got more. If you’re like me, you have several photo programs, some you wanted, some that were forced on you. I currently have: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Gallery, Picasa 3, Roxio 2010 PhotoSuite 12, and now CyberLink MediaShow; there may be others lurking on my system I’m not aware of. They all have their own indexing system and files, and then there’s the ever loving Vista indexer making life easier for us all.
One thing about CyberLink I like is their sense of design and style. It makes their products stand out, and easily recognized. The opening screen of the program is a prime example.
While the program waits for you to select one of the four options (Photos, Video, Disc, and Convert), the back wall of photos slowly turns left or right scrolling through all your photos. It would make a damn fine screen saver in itself.
After you click the button, it searches photos and finds a face in it to tag. It’s an amazing process to watch, and it does miss a couple of faces, and includes some that shouldn’t be used. It was able to differentiate between photos of real faces and photos of pictures of faces—that was impressive. If the face is too dark it doesn’t get picked up. It also seems to have a resolution limit, there were times if we had duplicate photos the - the program would not recognize the face on the smaller file.
You then go through all the faces it found and give them a name.
After that you can search through your collection for anyone you’ve tagged, or create a slide show. For instance, with this “name tag” label in place, users can easily call out all their husband or wife’s photos, compile these photos in a slideshow or an album and share with others. You can also upload your tagged photos to online services like Facebook and Flicker.
It looked through and analyzed 1,921 of my photos, using the GPU in the process, and took 14 and a half minutes to do it (it would be interesting to see how long it takes with just a CPU.) CyberLink offers a slide to that question.
Platform: CPU: Intel Core2Duo E8400 3.00 GHz, MB: MSI P7N SLI Platinum, VGA: Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB 16 Multiprocessors (8.15.11.8618), VGA2: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 512MB 16 Multiprocessors (8.15.11.8618), RAM: 2GB, OS: Vista32_Home Premium_SP1.
You can also create a screen saver or a movie and attach music to it. Three file formats are offered: MPEG4, MPEG2, and WMV, and you can select from 320 x 240 to 1280 x 720 resolutions.
One of the first choices on the opening screen is Convert. Convert is key. When you click on the icon from the start page, it runs a little video to show you what it does—converts your videos to mobile phone, iPod, YouTube, and there is a video editor.
When it comes to transcoding, CyberLink offers acceleration via ATI or Nvidia GPU, or Intel (i7). The program also has a handy batch conversion capability if you got a bunch of big videos you want to skinny down for YouTube or your phone.
The product is available now (and in nine languages) for just $49.95—that’s a lot of program for not much money.
What do we think?
There are a couple of web-based programs that will do face detection (e.g., FaceFinder, and Picasa Web Albums) And you can manually go through your pictures and tag them in Picasa, and almost every other photo program, but if you have a lot of photos its gets tedious. Apple’s iPhoto ’09 has a similar feature called appropriately enough, “Faces” (how does Apple keep coming up this clever stuff?) It sells for $79.
The CyberLink program was fast, accurate, convenient to use, and attractive. All the functions were smooth, logical, and easy to find. Definite recommendation for the family photo album manager.
