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Elgato turbo.264 mini-review

A couple months back, the people at elgato sent me a turbo.264 to test out. It's a USB-based hardware encoder for converting any video file to AppleTV or iPod format and comes with software that controls the device. It's a small black plastic stick not much larger than a keychain thumb drive and their site boasts large speed improvements over other conversion methods.

On my Mac Pro desktop (quad core, 2.16Ghz), my results were mixed. Comparing against the best AppleTV/iPod/iPhone converter I know, VisualHub, I did not see any speed improvements when converting an identical file using both the turbo.264 and VisualHub (with VisualHub set to the highest quality setting for AppleTV output). The software application that comes with the turbo.264 doesn't offer any quality settings beyond the output (AppleTV/iPod high quality/iPod low quality) and shows preview keyframes. I assume if I was using an older powerbook or slower macbook I might see some of the advertised speed differences.

On the positive side, the video quality on output files was great. I encoded several identical source files in both VisualHub and turbo.264 and even with VisualHub's settings on the highest "go nuts!" quality, video playback on my AppleTV was smoother and sharper with the turbo.264 output.

So in the end, I didn't see any speed increases, but video quality was noticeably better when using the turbo.264 over a software-only solution like VisualHub. Is the turbo.264 worth the ~$100 price versus a $23 piece of shareware? Possibly, if you're using a laptop mac or older G4 hardware, but for me the quality difference isn't enough to justify the price difference.

by Matt Haughey July 26, 2007 in Product Reviews

Comments

I think you missed the point of the device: the turbo.264 allows you to convert video without slowing down the rest of your system. Encoding spped isn't really the central idea of the device - freeing up your CPU to do other things is.

Posted by: McMac at Jul 26, 2007 3:45:09 PM

Well, they advertise multiples of speed increases using their device vs. using software, so I focused on testing out their marketing materials.

And given I've got four processors and 3Gb of RAM, VisualHub never puts much strain on my system. In testing out both methods of encoding a show for AppleTV, I don't recall any difference in how my mac seems to handle the encoding in the background while I worked on other things.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 26, 2007 8:22:53 PM

I've got an old 1.7Ghz Dual G5 Powermac and it made a huge difference for me.

The mac is fast enough for all the other uses I put it to (photoshop, email, web browsing) but encoding video was very painful - and loud, as the fans would come on full.

Eventually I'll buy a tasty new mac, but for now the Turbo.264 was an inexpensive way of solving the problem.

My one complaint is that I've had a couple of videos that the software has locked up on. This may be due to them being Freeview recordings and they had gaps in the timecode - hopefully this is going to be fixed in later revisions.

Posted by: Mark Baker at Jul 27, 2007 5:41:06 AM

I'd buy one (saw it on sale recently for $69!), except that it does not support 720p video. that is a basic requirement for ripping any HD source for the Apple TV

Posted by: Steve at Aug 5, 2007 9:27:50 AM

I agree with McMac,this is a flawed review.

I like a review with hard data. Like what types of files, size, and times for conversion.

You make too many "assumptions".

Your system is not the target system. It is marketed as a co-processor. They are correct in that it frees up the system my iMac G5 can actually function doing two things.

As for the folks with timecode breaks, try mpeg streamclip.

Posted by: Mark at Aug 5, 2007 3:06:42 PM

It certainly would be nice if we could all have quad-processor Macs! Then there may not be a need for such a device. I think Elgato made a big mistake in trusting this person to review their product. Maybe you could have tried it on a slower machine before you went ahead and denounced it as inferior. You have to remember that the vast majority of Mac users are NOT using quad-processor machines and thus may have a VERY different experience.
I personally have just ordered one for myself to use with my 1.25Ghz Powerbook and my Dual1.8Ghz PowerMac, so I actually expect to see significant gain as mentioned in OTHER more accurate reviews.

Posted by: Rhett at Aug 14, 2007 8:15:08 AM

I disagree that the review is in any way flawed. I'm using an almost year-old Apple computer to test out a new device that is heavily marketed as a speed increase device. It sounds like it really does work better on slower hardware but I was hoping to see at least some speed improvement over a software-only alternative, and I reported exactly what I saw, which is no speed improvement at all.

It's not a total loss, the video quality was in fact better, I just didn't see the speed bumps they advertise.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Aug 14, 2007 9:59:28 AM

Elgato has just updated the software - so you can now adjust the settings. The video quality is even better!!! Visualhub is an excellent product since it supports multiple formats but for straight ipod or apple tv encoding Turbo kicks butt!

Posted by: Nana the Dog at Aug 22, 2007 11:29:01 AM

I've just finished my first full week with the turbo .264, and I'm mostly satisfied. On my 2GHZ Intel Duo Core 2 iMac (2GB RAM) I've noticed about a 40-50% increase in speed over handbrake. And on my new DVR/media server 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo mini (1 GB RAM) I've noticed about 90-125% increase. Using Apple’s Activity Monitor the turbo’s software has never cracked 30% of my CPU cycles during conversion and usually stays near 22-24% on my iMac. This is very important to me since I’m a photographer and I spend most of my free time editing photos in Adobe’s processor heavy CS3.

However had I done my homework ahead of time I probably wouldn't have bought it if I had known that subtitles from DVDs won't transfer as I tend to watch a lot of foreign content.

Posted by: Steven Wray at Sep 6, 2007 10:13:34 AM

I have the totally opposite to report back. The quality of the turbo.264 can't match handbrake or visualhub on a 2 pass setting, and really at higher resolutions on a macbook pro 2.4 - it's not much faster either. For powerc users it's a no brainer - but for those with newer intel macs - i'd give it a miss for now.

Posted by: rockstar at Oct 1, 2007 8:30:32 PM

Probably not the most realtime-efficient addition to a new Mac Pro, but still may make sense if you want to keep using your processors for other heavy lifting while also (more slowly) encoding h.264 in the background:

http://logicalextremes.blogspot.com/2008/02/h264-encoding-on-8-core-mac-pro.html

Posted by: Logical Extemes at Feb 11, 2008 12:36:24 PM

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