by Vincent M. Ferrari
Apple Phone Show Producer
I happened to snag an elgato Turbo.264 for a review I’m writing for another site, and within two weeks of getting my review sample, I called them up and asked them if I could buy it. It really does everything it claims to. For those not in the know, the Turbo.264 converts any video that can be opened by QuickTime (sorry, Mac only!) into H.264 format, perfectly compressed, resized, and down-sampled for your iPod, AppleTV, or Sony PSP.
Yesterday, elgato released version 1.1 of the included software. Among the improvements was one that particularly applied to us iPhone geeks! You now have the ability to convert video specifically for the iPhone including the wacky 14:9 widescreen aspect ratio that the iPhone supports.
If you aren’t convinced that the Turbo.264 is a great device, I promise you, you won’t be disappointed. In my testing, videos that took upwards of 40 minutes with QuickTime Pro to convert now take approximately 4-6 minutes. If you download a lot of video from the internet and want to convert it for your iPhone, this is definitely the fastest way to do it, and now with iPhone support and the ability to set up custom profiles, you really have no excuse to not give it a go.
The elgato Turbo.264 retails for $99 and is available wherever fine Apple-related products are sold or on elgato’s online store.
Just so I can get a comparison (since I have about 30 gigs of TV show, roughly 82 hours, to convert from DIVX and XVid to H.264, and will be getting a Mac Mini anyway)…
…that video that took 40 minutes to convert. How long of a video (in viewing time) was it?
It was a 12 minute video at DV resolution edited and rendered up in iMovie with music, lots of stills, titles, and transitions.
It was this one @ 6 minutes, 34 seconds…
I truly love this device.
Does of have to downscale or will it do full resolution
I’ve been intrigued by this product since it came out. My typical usage for h.264 is encoding .m2t files (streams) so I can watch in iTunes or iPod/iPhone.
My question is does this Turbo.264 work with the freeware program MPEG Streamclip (from squared5)?
Thanks for the review and any help you can provide.
I have one of these, and it works pretty well. I haven’t downloaded the update though. I am looking forward to seeing the iphone results.
I highly recommend it, especially with an older machine.
The one big drawback it has is that I pretty much have to use the proprietary software. Though it will work directly from QuickTime or any application that uses QuickTime directly to encode. But sadly it can’t be used through Handbrake, my favorite DVD conversion program.
@ScottieP: There’s no reason it shouldn’t. If the files are standard MP4 files and playable in QuickTime, they should convert just fine.
Like I said, anything openable in QuickTime should be convertible by the Turbo.264. I’ve yet to find anything it chokes on and I’ve had it since April.
@Joe: It automatically down-samples it to the proper resolution based on the profile you choose.
Okay, that’s 720×480 resolution, 12 minute run time compressed in 6 minutes and change using the hardware encoder, vs. 40 minutes with just QuickTime Pro.
It’s kinda hard to beat that. Time to put it on my next tech buy list, after the new Mac Mini.