Elgato Turbo.264 HD

Elgato makes a bunch of video-centric devices for the Macintosh. One of them is a USB dongle that provides hardware h264 compression assistance. The original was the Turbo.264, and just recently they released and updated version called the Turbo.264 HD.

Some time ago I purchased the Elgato turbo.264. At the time I had a 17" Macbook Pro, 2.3Ghz Core2 Duo. I was underwhelmed, to be honest. My laptop was just as fast as the USB dongle at encoding virtually anything. There was a significant drop in the processor power required to encode the video, but I was looking for a time advantage, and it just wasn't there, so I returned it. At the time, I thought it would be a great addition to, say, a PPC based Mac Mini or a PPC based Powerbook - it made both of those machines encode h.264 at almost the speed of my Macbook Pro.

A week ago, I bought the Turbo.264 HD. This is a much different experience! I have one of the newer unibody Macbook Pros - noticeably faster than the old 17 - and the Turbo.264 HD kicks ass. It does SD - such as ripping an unencrypted DVD to my iPod for treadmill viewing - at ridiculous speeds. At full DVD resolution I frequently see 80 to 130 frames per second, and average well over 3X realtime. At 720p HD it encodes at a rate faster than realtime in nearly every instance. I haven't timed it at 1080, but it does 1080, and I have no reason to believe it won't be much faster than my unassisted laptop.

The software that comes with it supports drag-and-drop encoding of nearly anything from avi to mkv. For some reason, the software has a long, complex authorization key; I'm not sure why, as it won't work without the Turbo.264 HD plugged in. But hey, whatever. Regardless, it works very much like other user-friendly Mac-based video encoders. Drag and drop a movie, select the format for the output, and click start. It gives you a fps count and a time remaining counter. A little red light lights up on the USB dongle to let you know it's processing data.

Processor utilization is high, as well; I suspect that the dongle handles a few of the encoding tasks very rapidly, and the rest is left to the software. However, testing on a much slower device shows a very, very significant increase in encoding speed, even with the slower processor.

You have considerable control over the output, but that's hidden if you're not interested. The default settings should work for most people.

I did find one odd bit. I was encoding an HD program that I captured from my cable box. The show was recorded in 1080p HD, and had an aspect ratio on the order of 2.35:1 or so. When I ripped it to 720p using the 720p Setting on the turbo.264 HD, I ended up with a video that was 1728x720, rather than the 1280x540 I was expecting. I'm not sure what's up with that; I re-encoded with a custom setting of 1280x540, and it encoded it faster than realtime.

You can also use the device in any program that supports Quicktime export properly. This means iMovie will take advantage of the turbo.264 HD - and that's a real win! I have a 720p video camera, and the Turbo.264 makes short work of encoding those videos to h.264.

All in all, if you do a lot of video encoding or converting, whether re-encoding content from others, or just making your own movies, the Turbo.264 is a must have.