Turbo.264

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A Hardware Review
by Steve Evans
Review Date: August 2007

Product: Turbo.264
With Elgato Video Conversion Software, Version 1.0.1

Company: elgato Systems
URL: http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvturbo

Price: $99

MinimumSystem Requirements: G4/G5/Intel Core; 512MB RAM; Built-in USB 2.0 port; OS X v10.4 or later

Test System: iMac G5 (rev. B); 2.0Ghz; 1.5GB RAM; OS X v10.4

Reviewer's Rating: 3 out of 5 Apples

Elgato Systems is known for bringing innovative & clever "TV-on-your-Mac" solutions to users of our favorite digital media hub. The company's newest offering, the Turbo.264, is a Hi-speed USB 2.0 device designed to make it easy for fans of the iPod + Video, AppleTV, & Sony PSP to watch pristine h.264 video on their chosen platform. This thumb-sized hardware device is an MPEG-4 encoder that takes most of the heavy lifting of video conversion off of your PowerPC G4/G5 or Intel chip. Interface is via a simple drag & drop application. It saves you time, electricity and aggravation! Can it really be that simple?

Previously, I would have used the open-source application HandBrake or TechSpansion's VisualHub to convert videos from QuickTime and other formats to MPEG4 & h.264. While these programs work very well, they take a toll on your machine, in terms of processor usage, heat generated and electricity used. Software solutions like these might take up to 15 hours to process a 2-hour video. That's a lot of time and energy.

Since the Turbo.264 hardware speeds up conversions by a factor of 4-10 times, you potentially reap time & energy savings. The product can convert many of the popular video formats such as: MPEG2, DivX, XviD, AVI, MOV and DV. It does this hardware conversion about 10 times faster than software conversion on a G4, 6x faster than a G5 and 4 times faster than an Intel Mac. Typical conversion time for a 2-hour movie into h.264 took slightly less than 2 hours on my iMac G5.

The Turbo.264 does not rip commercially released DVDs very well. That's okay, because ripping those DVDs is illegal in the United States. The software solutions I mentioned do a much better job, anyway. Handbrake & VisualHub let you crop out the black letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the frame; Turbo.264 does not. Also, Turbo.264 puts whatever language is on track 1 of the DVD into your movie. Handbrake & VisualHub both allow you to pick the language track. Some DVDs are not even recognized by the Turbo.264 software.

Some Internet videos use proprietary Microsoft Windows Media codecs for audio and video. When converting videos with the Turbo.264, it's a good idea to make sure that the video plays properly in QuickTime Player before dragging and dropping it into Turbo.264 software.

So with all these constraints, when would I use this product? Primarily for converting TiVo and DVD-R recordings for later viewing on my iPod. It's also great for converting things you find on the Internet in DivX format.

Installation of the Turbo.264 software is a simple drag and drop into your Applications folder from the main CD window. You don't have to use their application to make the Turbo.264 hardware work, however. Any QuickTime aware program can use it. Send your project directly to the Turbo.264 via the pop-up menu in your application's export settings "sheet."

I do recommend this product with some reservations. I like the time & energy savings, and the small form factor. If it were able to accept almost any video format, I'd tell you to rush out and buy one, but that simply isn't the case. It will convert many popular file types and the video quality is excellent using the program's preset settings, but some badly needed settings are unavailable in the over-simplified user interface. Buy one if you need speed, but be aware of the product's many shortcomings.

Steve Evans
Reviewer: Steve Evans

Steve never owned a computer growing up (unless an Atari counts). The closest he got was playing with the Commodore 64 owned by his college sweetheart.

In college, he used his first Mac Plus and was hooked. It took 7 more years to for Steve to actually buy a Mac, a Quadra 660av. That was 7 Macs and about 8 operating systems ago. He's never looked back.

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