Elgato Turbo.264: Say Goodbye to iSquint

Posted by Alec Feld on 05/23/07 in Hardware

Turbo.264 I’m not a big fan of putting videos on iPods. In fact, the last time I used my iPod video to actually watch a movie was over a year ago. Getting a movie from DVD to iPod was a long and tedious process. Converting the video to iPod format used to take ages, and was almost pointless at times. However, Elgato has recently introduced their Turbo.264, a hardware video encoder designed to speed up video encoding. Think of the Turbo as a processor that’s devoted to converting video.

The thumbdrive style device plugs right into your Mac, and quickly installs it’s codecs into QuickTime (which includes any app that uses QuickTime’s encoding). It includes four codecs, iPod (best), iPod (small), PSP, and AppleTV. OK, fine, it doesn’t encode at any user defined specification, but it does convert into the four most common, used, and wanted formats. If you’re not into using QuickTime to convert, Elgato includes their own app for converting videos.

The app can batch convert, gives a video preview of what it’s encoding at the moment, and shows estimated time left and frames per second. Speaking of FPS, the Turbo converted a DivX video of mine to iPod at 48 fps. Not bad at all compared to the 15-25 fps that QuickTime encodes at for me.

Turbo.264

The Turbo is a great product for those who like to put videos on their iPods extremely quickly, or for people who just want to put all of their videos on their AppleTV’s. The encoding time and speed is greatly improved over QuickTime’s, and lets the user run other, processor intensive apps without worrying about if there’s enough speed. Although the encoder only allows four settings, the Turbo should be fine for most consumers. The Turbo.264 retails for $99 and is available now from Elgato.

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9 Comment(s)

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Will said on

May 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 pm

I have found more use in putting videos on my laptop. I have a pretty large collection of Scrubs and The Office episodes ripped from DVD’s in my itunes library. That was a great office episode, by the way.

bandersnatch said on

May 23rd, 2007 at 10:15 pm

But how fast did it convert the sample clip in your writeup?

Marvin Sum said on

May 24th, 2007 at 1:03 am

I’m still waiting for my 6G iPod. Until that arrives, my videos will stay on my MacBook as well.

thewrinklyninja said on

May 24th, 2007 at 4:46 am

VisualHub is cheaper than this and has more options to boot. You may have to wait a minute or two longer,but hey. I don’t mind.

Alec Feld said on

May 24th, 2007 at 7:41 am

It’s more than a minute or two. For this video, VisualHub took over an hour, while this took under 15 minutes.

That’s more than a few minutes.

muaddib420 said on

May 24th, 2007 at 11:48 am

this looks like a great product, but a bit expensive. seems like paying alot (a hundred bucks!) just to put some movies on your ipod or appletv. (and explain to me again why i would want to encode a DVD to stream to my appleTV when i could just walk over to the DVD player and put it in and press “play”). nice product, but definitely niche.

Donald Perreault said on

May 24th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

I am not impressed with Turbo.264 at all and I am considering returning it.

I am having Audio/Video syncing problems and it comes with 4 presets that can not be changed.

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Joshua Mitchell said on

May 24th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Donald, are you the same Donald that’s complaining about sync problems on the other blogs… and not listening when others post the software update that elgato has posted on their site?… actually going so far as to delete your post once someone mentions the software update and then reposting later in the chain?

If I’m accusing you falsely, I apologize, but it would be really good to actually pay attention to other posts…

1) Were there problems? Yes.
2) Are there anymore? No.

BTW - Elgato spells out very clearly on they’re site that there are presets that cannot be changed.

muaddib420 - Yeah, it’s pricey but the beauty of it is that you get a huge boost in video encoding speed for relatively little money. Realize that converting VOBs / videos for iPods is not all this little baby is there for… Final Cut, iLife, and other software can also leverage the thumb processor’s power for encoding video…

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Protonius said on

June 25th, 2007 at 7:16 am

Hi, I just bought the product and I have mixed feelings about it. Yes it encodes quickly. I have some codecs from http://blog.twenty08.com/2006/12/27/codec-pack-for-all-the-new-mac-users/ and I assumed they would work well. But when I drag my videos (more then five at a time) into the Elgato turbo window it crashes all the time. There is no way for me to drag more than three or four video files into the window… How come? This is in the latest osx. And further more this product does not work (maybe a codec problem) Leopard yet (we forgive this but maybe something they should start to look into)…

Any thoughts on this guys?

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