ElGato Turbo 264: First Impressions

There is a downside to having an AppleTV, iPhone or video capable iPod: converting videos to a compatible format is always a hassle. There are plenty of applications to handle this problem, no two of them are alike.

I have tons of DVDs, ripping them turned out to be quite the adventure. I did the first few dozen or so one by one, with Handbrake. I wouldn't know until I got an AC3 receiver that I ripped all of these DVDs wrong and will have to eventually re-rip them because the default Handbrake conversion for AppleTV converts the AC3 tracks to AAC. Ouch.

VisualHub is great, but it is slow. It doesn't have a pause button, which is really stupid: if you have a big batch of files to convert and you are using too much power, you can't pause the job, you have to kil l it, then remove from the queue whatever is good to go and then start again.

I didn't know I could use Handbrake to process files from a DVD already ripped. The time needed to rip a DVD with Mac The Ripper, then convert it for the AppleTV with Handbrake is usually less than if you let Handbrake do the whole job. More ouch.

Roxio Popcorn, for some really fucking stupid reason, won't allow you to pass-through the AC3 from a DVD, instead you are forced to convert to AAC. The interface *is* better, and it queues nicely, plus it has a proper pause feature. And it allows for hardware acceleration.

That's when I learned that ElGato has a hardware accelerator for h.264. I spent a week or so scouring the web for reviews and hate posts about it, and overall it seems to have a good reception. It is universally accepted that if your mac is not very new, the performance improvements are dramatic. But, what about recent fast macs?

After grinding through about 15 hours of video, I can tell that even in a Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 3GB RAM, Leopard, and while Time Machine is running, iTunes is streaming to my AppleTV over 100BaseT, and Parallels Desktop is running XP Pro over a Cisco VPN, it is running a hell of a lot faster than VisualHub.

The best part is that the resource utilization of the Turbo.264 application is very low, most of the time I can't tell it is running. The USB dongle with the hardware encoder doesn't even get warm. Right now I am seeing consistent 40fps or better encoding (the source material is 29fps, if you can't crank out at least that much, it means it will take you longer than one hour to encode one hour of video). In real life this means that I am cranking out avi/divx to h.264 conversions at about one hour of encoding for every two hours of video input. I imagine this is going to depend wildly on the source material.

So yes, even if the machine is fast, you can at your very worst expect it to use very little resources to crank out the same workload that would usually max out a multiple core mac.