The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

In that same vein, Apple should really let me trade in my iMac G5 since it's like really, really slow compared to the new imacs :)

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While it is silly to expect free upgrades to a hardware product, as a current Turbo.264 owner I will say that the old Turbo is basically worthless. I've owned it for several months and it barely speeds up transcoding, my processor usage still spikes during the transcoding process and about half of the resulting video files have A/V sync issues.

Needless to say, these days the Turbo.264 spends most of its time in a drawer and so I don't expect I'll be buying a new one anytime soon.

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THJ, perhaps you should read Joey's response and see the reality of the market for the Turbo H.264. Initial market demand for the Turbo H.264HD would, of course, be predicated on happiness with the prior product. If the customers who purchased the older model saw no value, why should they expect that those unsatisfied customers would form a line to get the HD... or even recommend it. I would expect that the customer sat for their old product is pretty poor since, for most people, all it really did was eat a USB slot.

Given this and some basic marketing, it seems that they should want to court the old H.264 customers who saw no value in their product since they are the ones more likely to consider spending money on the new product.

In terms of your G5, I am assuming that you received some market utility out of it since you continue to buy Apple hardware? If you saw no utility, would you still be buying it?

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funny how almost every mention of the original turbo.264 has disappeared from their website. even from the support pages. it's typical for elgato to screw existing customers: they also tried to make me cough up $40 (iirc) for a software update for my eyetv. and now the turbo264hd gets functions that could be implemented in the turbo264, but aren't. screw them, they lost a customer (although from what i know about them they won't care too much about that).

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Balls you stupid tool Transcoding doesnt just mean decoding/encoding as if you encode something you have to decode it before you can encode it.

This thing doesnt speed up decoding it just speeds up the encoding.

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DUDE Serioulsy!!!!

The 1st gen elgato turbo didn't do squat for me and my Mac Pro, in fact I'm pretty sure it was much slower!!! It helps a BIT on my MBP for work, but not much, can't even really be sure. That would be very cool of them to offer a cheap upgrade price for previous owners or trade-in or something at any rate, maybe a firmware update....or is it new hardware totally? Don't know a TON about it.

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If you weren't happy, why didn't you return it?

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1080P is not possible on ATV due to hardware limitations.

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@THJ. Thats the point of this device, to offer HD decoding for computers that don't have enough CPU/GPU performance to handle it.

Just like the ATV.

ATV doesn't have the CPU to handle decoding 1080p content.

It *can* however output 1080p signals over HDMI. It just can't play 1080p content.

Which is why I asked. Can this dongle offer 1080p playback on ATV?

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@Balls Thanks for playing, but you are wrong. The dongle is for ENCODING which is different than DECODING, by um, about 180 degrees.

Wait, I better make this simpler. It does the exact opposite of what you claim it does.

Plugging some encoding dongle into your ATV is not going to make it decode anything better/faster/higher resolution.

The HDMI standard *can* support 1080p output, but the ATV *can not*.

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@moulles: actually, numbnuts, this dongle is for TRANSCODING, which involves DECODING/ENCODING. It takes video formats that you can't natively watch, and transcode them into a format you can.

And one comment lower, you'll see my mea culpa.

I output 1080p from ATV. ATV supports output of 1080p just fine. It doesn't have the balls to play back native 1080p, but it can upconvert. So thank you for playing, and in short, go fuck yourself.

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@balls I'm glad you may have gotten on the clue train, but you were the prick, to THJ, first. Can't take a little snark back, huh?

Yes, transcoding mean decoding, but as clearly stated it transcodes AVCHD into h.264. Unless you've got gobs of fantastic home movies of your no doubt equally annoying and clueless family, and the programming ability to build a driver to snarf the decoded content off the dongle and somehow make the AppleTV play it back directly through the HDMI port, which is likely physically impossible, this device isn't going to help you decode your DVD rips, or other downloaded content, at 1080p.

Further, outputting upconverted 720p to 1080p, is not equivalent to outputting native 1080p. Even with your limited mental capacity, you seemed capable of understanding that in your initial post. I mentioned the HDMI standard because your second dumb as dirt post clearly intimates that you think somehow by having a magic dongle, short of dubiously possible driver magic, native 1080p is going to magically pump out of your HDMI cable. And seriously I'm being generous here, you probably aren't the type of person that would even have the knowledge to consider if a driver would be required...your statement about the Tiger OS somehow being the limiting factor to 1080p output, not hardware, being the tell

In short, you fuck yourself just by typing you festering cock sore. Thank you for trying to play, now get back on the short bus.

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@moulles: It's really cute when you try to sound smart in your posts. It reminds me of the retarded kids trying their hardest in PE.

P.S.: I love it when you talk dirty to me.

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@balls Not as cute as when you post like you're auditioning for a remake of "Life Goes On", then pretend that you're not Corky.

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@moulles

Hey, good luck bowling against President Obama!

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@ balls & moulles

LOL nerd rage :P

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Ah, I missread. Only handles for inporting AVCHD content for use with finalcut etc, not for playback.

Thanks.

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