Rhozet Carbon Coder is one of my favorite batch encoding and workstation testing tools because it produces very good quality video and is extraordinarily efficient at multi-threaded operation. Throw a 16-core Nehalem-based system like HP’s Z800 at Carbon Coder, and you’ll see 100% CPU utilization on all 16-cores. (See my review of the Z800.)

Things have been all quiet on the Carbon Coder front, however, and I’ve been working with version 3.0 seemingly forever without significant upgrade. Well, the company changed all that this week, with enough press releases to choke a Wal-Mart paper shredder (hey, if you can think of a better simile, let me know).

I’ll discuss the top three. The absolute coolest news is that Carbon Coder will be the first encoding tool to implement Google’s new Content ID system, which relies on “fingerprints� of the video content to prevent unwanted postings to YouTube or other Google sites. Here’s how it works.

Say you’re a content producer. You encode your file with Carbon Coder, create a fingerprint and send it to YouTube, with instructions not to post the file before September, 2009. Each time YouTube encodes a file uploaded by a user, it also fingerprints the video, and compares the fingerprint to their internal library of fingerprints.

If there’s a match with your video, and it’s August 2009, YouTube won’t post it. If it’s after August 2009, and YouTube posts the video, as copyright owner, you get your share of any advertising revenue generated by page views of that video, not the user who actually uploaded it.

Basically, fingerprinting lets YouTube go legit, and according to Dave Trescot, VP of the Rhozet Business Unit, Carbon Coder got the early nod because it supplies encoding for many of the top companies that YouTube wanted content from. While Google will obviously have to work with other encoding tools, Rhozet was first, which is impressive.

Rhozet also announced some improvements to Carbon Coder to be delivered in May, 2009, including enhanced H.264 quality and faster encoding. Two new filters, for video deblocking and motion-compensated temporal filtering, will also be included. You can see the deblocking filter in the screen shot, with before on the left, and after on the right.

Finally, Rhozet announced and showed a beta of their new quality control tool, which not only checks the quality of the encoded video using typical parameters like quantization and signal to noise ratio, it also compares the encoded file to the original to make sure no sections were truncated or otherwise excluded. Quality control is looking to be a must have feature on high end encoding systems in 2009, and it’s nice to see that Carbon Coder is going with the flow. No ship date was announced for the QC features, however.