Elgato Turbo.264 Graphics Accelerator: First Look

Aron; I am almost certain that the "white" or "silver" that you are seeing is the result of flash photography making the front edge "shine". It's just a black MacBook. I am not sure why this would throw someone off.

I have the Turbo.264 and it is only OK. Since it only works with QuickTime, it does not help with Handbrake. What i usually do for 1/2 hr tv shows is pull the shows off with Handbrake and save them as full resolution MPEG4 files with no compression. Then I take those files and process them using the Turbo.264. It take about 22 minutes to do a normal 22 minute tv show. Using VisualHub on a 4 processor Intel MacPro, it only takes 10 minutes to do the same thing. Turbo.264 is really only good for people with older Macs. A new Mac is fast enough to make it unnecessary.

If you are processing something from iMovie, it helps more since you can use QuickTime to compress but it is still not much of an improvement over a fast mac.

@29 Really? Can you tell me which Apple store carries the Black-on-white(or silver?) Macbook? Boy would I sure love one!

/sarcasm

I bought one of these for use with my G4 PowerMac but ended up returning it. For Standard Definition, this thing screams. It's really impressive. Encodings that would have taken 50 minutes with quicktime now take only 3-4 minutes. The problem for me is that my camcorder is HDV (Canon HV10 1080i), which is rapidly becoming a consumer format.

The Turbo 264 could not handle the fact that HDV is anamorphic. The Apple TV Quicktime export option outputs 540p from HDV so I thought that if pushed anamorphically that this file size would fit the 800 x 600 limit. Unfortunately it stretches the video instead and exaggerated the interlacing.

It's a shame too because it really does work for other video types. If you are ripping DVDs or converting standard DV for your Apple TV, this is great but if you need to work on HDV you're out of luck.

I've had my T.264 for a few weeks and have been using it to transcode files for my Apple TV. Yes, it’s fast — but my main problem is that files it creates are huge, on average about 70% larger than H.264 files created using VisualHub (Good setting), yet the quality is slightly inferior. (Example: a 350Mb Xvid file turned into a 394Mb VisualHub H.264 file, but a 672Mb Turbo.264 file.)

It’ll be fine for bashing out H.264 files that will be watched and discarded, but for anything you want to keep it’s not a good option (at the moment?).

Patrick,

The build is called '1.0.2b9'. It fixed all the sync/choppiness issues. They need to send it out to the masses who own these devices ASAP!

Tony,
How recently did you get the new version? I have recieved new versions from them but I still have serious issues when encoding to Apple TV. It works great when encoding to iPod, but any ultra widescreen content (i.e. newer ripped DVDs) results in an audio/video syncing problem. The picture quality is great, but you get the old Godzilla movie effect. Anyone else have this problem?

I've had it for a few weeks and there's one single problem that bothers me more than anything else: Lack of fullscreen resolution for the PSP... Don't have a VideoPod nor an AppleTV yet so it's the PSP for me.

Why anyone would hate a device such as this is beyond me I can encode in almost realtime with my 1.25GHz G4 iBook. Even though, VisualHub, which I normaly use, produces better quality files at smaller size (almost half of what t.264 produces) I can live with that as software H.264 encoding might take up to three hours/25mins of video so not even night encoding isn't a viable option to me. Just give me fullscreen PSP resolution and I'm set.

Now, I understand that the lack of options is what turns most people away from this but here's hope for future hacking of the t.264... Right now it's the only option I have for encoding H.264, so it's either that or nothing. (Tyler@Techspansion if you're listening: Pretty please with sugar on to make this work with VisHub even if just rudimentary...?)

800x600 max? How lame.. I was considering getting one of these for my mac mini-come-server, but without HD support it is dead to me...

@20: A black MacBook, the likes of which has been around for a while.

I'm actually quite interested in this product, since my 1 GHz iBook has shown its age when it comes to encoding 640x480 H.264 content. I mean, sure, it can play back 29 FPS 1024x768 H.264 content (like a resized version of the PotC:DMC trailer...), but encoding is a whole other story. $99 is a bit of a price, especially when I've got a bad job and am in desperate need of a new hard disk. And after hearing it doesn't work with HandBrake, I'm a little less enticed to get it, but not totally surprised. I rarely use QuickTime for any encoding stuff, especially projects that I'm exporting to my PSP (ffmpegX is the only thing I know that produces files that'll play in full res on that thing). And considering that I'm aiming to buy a new MacBook Pro in about a year, I'm not sure if it's worth the investment right now. Not to say it's a bad product, just that it doesn't fit my slightly unusual specifications.