Elgato turbo.264 now shipping

New Turbo.264 software (beta for the next week or two) will allow for better DVD conversions AND custom presets. Here are a couple screen shots and a video.

http://jasontomczak.com/2007/07/elgato-turbo264-beta-features.html

re: Derek

The hardware apparently supports hardware encode and decode but no software currently uses the turbo.264 for playback.

Does this help speed up/assist PLAYBACK of h264 files at all?

My old Mac mini frequently chokes on x264/avc1 encoded video files if I'm running other programs (and I usually am) and it'd be sweet indeed if this helped all processing of h264, wither encoding or playing back.

Thanks.

So far so good. Averaging about 45fps on a dual 1.6 Ghz Intel Mac Mini. 1gb of RAM, with about 7 other apps running (including EyeTV, iTunes, this web browser, and a couple of file server apps). I'm at around 66% cpu usage on both processors, while I'm also using Yade X to make VOBs to feed the encoder. Yade just finished and the processors are bouncing around 50-65%. A 22 minute episode of 30 Rock encodes in about 12 minutes on the iPod HIGH setting, and it looks about 95% the quality of the original. I'll try some HD content right from the source tonight after Heroes. As stated before, if the encoder framework recognizes more than one stick I'm totally buying another at the end of the week.

Waiting for mine, should be here tomorrow. My biggest question is if it supports a queue across two sticks. I read somewhere that it did, could mean 2 transcoding jobs finishing at real time at the same time. I'll buy the second the second this is confirmed.

Kai, I don't think uncompressed really matters, if it could transcode MPEG2 then HDV & ATSC would be easy for USB2 to handle. Given that I'm only barely tolerant of EyeTV software and EyeTV Hybrid (I almost returned mine), and given the complaints, I won't even try this.

It appears Donald has some sort of personal issue w/elgato, as he removed his comment from yesterday, then reposted it today, after mine.

Interesting.

At any rate, elgato addressed the sync issue immediately (if not personally to Donald) with the release of v1.0.1

Sync issues are, in a word, not :)

As for his point about his 4-core machine:

That's an endorsement if ever I heard one :)

You too can get 30fps or better for your h264 encoding, with a USB dongle...without the need of a 4 core powerhouse machine ;)

I think that is the point of the product, lol

-K

I too received this product.

elgato released v1.0.1 of the software on friday may 18th. It appears to fix the sync issues.

There was a question about the lack of HD. There is a really simple, technical reason for this; USB 2.0 isn't fast enough to move uncompressed video frames, so it would be piontless to make a usb 2.0 device to do this...perhaps a Firewire 800 or expresscard product will handle that load in the future?

As far as speeds go, on my first gen original MacBook Pro,#Ghz machine, it does AppleTV Resolution and bitrate H264 at a continuous 30fps from MPEG2 Source material...rates I have personally never gotten out of handbrake or anything else.

More importantly, it does this without overheating the machine or dragging everything else to a crawl.

If you like iPod sized videos, it does these at a staggering 92 frames per second average speed from the same source as above. "Big" iPod videos come in around 36-40 fps.

However, where it really shines is on G4 and G5's. Yes some people still have these.
My wife's 12" PowrbookG4 1.33Ghz machine was able to crank out video across all the aforementioned formats at around 40 frames per second, continuously.

Yes. You read that correctly.

If doing these kinds of conversions is your thing, I highly recommend this product...it will save a load of time and energy load on your computer.

If anyone wants a couple of screenshots of it doing its thing let me know.

-K

My Turbo.264 stick and software arrived today. The first two movies I encoded using the Turbo.264 have the video and audio out of sync.

I have received no reply from elgato after asking for assistance with the problem.

Will send it back.

BTW: It is not any quicker than Handbrake on my Dual, Dual Core Mac Pro

I am looking for a PCI card solution for my Mac Pro to speed up decoding. Is there such a product out there?