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Elgato Turbo.264 - Video H.264 (MP4) Encoder Hardware 10020500 | 
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| Brand: Elgato
Category: CE
List Price: $151.89
Buy New: $79.77
You Save: $72.12 (47%)
New (13) from $79.77
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 2421
Format: Cd
Platform: Macintosh
Media: CD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Fragile: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Mac OS X
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 19.7 x 19.7 x 19.7
MPN: 10020500
Model: 10020500
UPC: 852095000676
EAN: 0852095000676
ASIN: B000PCVIEU
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New Sealed in Retail Box. Ships same day, From the Mac & iPod Leaders Since 1988
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| Features:
| • | Convert widescreen DVD (VIDEO_TS) video files without black bars. | | • | Tweak video resolution and frame rate; | | • | Adjust the video settings so it plays on your smartphone; | | • | Pick the audio track you wish to go with the main feature when converting VIDEO TS folders. | | • | Turbo264 supports 4 - 3 and 16 - 9 aspect ratios as well as widescreen |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Are you frustrated by the amount of time it takes to export video to the H.264 format? Are you unable to use your Mac for other purposes while you are converting videos to the H.264 format? Introduce yourself to El Gato Turbo 264 Video Encoder that converts videos for play on iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and Sony PSP.
Videos can take a surprisingly long time to encode to the H.264 format - sometimes longer than the actual playing time. What's more, H.264 video encoding can demand a sizeable chunk of system resources. How long and how much depends on: the processor speed of your Mac, the length and complexity of the source video, the size of the video file, and the amount of video compression required for the desired end result. Turbo.264 accelerates video encoding up to four times faster on Macs with Intel Core processors. On an older Mac like a PowerPC G4 or PowerPC G5, the acceleration is exponentially faster - some users report up to 10 and 15 times faster.
Turbo.264 comes with an easy "drag and drop" application. The application converts unencrypted videos one at a time or in a batch, and drops the converted file(s) into iTunes, where they automatically synch with a connected iPod, Apple TV or iPhone. Turbo.264 also supports the H.264 (MPEG-4) export command of popular Macintosh video applications, including EyeTV's Wi-Fi Access feature. Not only does Turbo.264 get the job done faster, it frees up your Mac for other tasks while video encoding is in progress. Think of it as a ?co-processor? for your Mac. The software application that comes with Elgato Turbo.264 offers an easy-to-use choice of presets for the iPod, Sony PSP, Apple TV, and iPhone. For Apple TV content, the quality of videos encoded with Turbo.264 software is unrivaled: Turbo.264 converts standard definition television recordings without scaling so that recordings appear on Apple TV in the same resolution they were recorded.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...
 A great time saver April 3, 2008
Pedro A. Vera (Reston, VA United States)
I bought this product because I have been trying to move all of my movies and TV shows from DVD to AppleTV, and H.264 encoding takes too much time even on a Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33 with 3GB ram. I was concerned that people with newer macs were reporting little improvement, but most people still reported that even if the speed did not improve much, resource utilization did.
For the price I was willing to pick up a little speed bump even if it meant the computer will stay usable while the video conversion is taking place.
I have pushed over 20 hours of video (99% of it started as .divx) and so far I am extremely pleased with the results. It is almost impossible for it, at least in my case, to average less than 40fps, and resource usage is half what I was getting from using Handbrake or VisualHub. The videos look identical to what I am used to see from Handbrake or Visual Hub.
Setup was a no-brainer: drag an application from the CD, then plug the dongle into a USB 2.0 port. The unit comes with a 6-inch USB cable, which is nice if you are afraid of bumping the dongle and breaking the USB port.
The built-in application is much nicer, even if it has limited tweaking capabilities, than Roxio Popcorn (which can take advantage of this) and Handbrake (which can't).
It has one thing that I don't like: as far as I can tell, TS_Video sound is converted to AAC instead of passing it through as AC3. That is the only one thing I am not crazy about.
Except for that, it is perfect.
Great Product. Makes my PowerMac G4 like new. March 30, 2008
Chad Cardinal
This works great with my old MDD G4 Powermac. I have a 3rd party USB 2 card that it plugs into. No problems. I have a lot of old movies that I needed to convert to play on my Apple TV. I was seriously thinking about getting a new mac just for that job. (I really don't need a new Mac for anything else, I don't do much but surf the web, and use iTunes, so I did not want to spend the bucks now.) This little gadget saved the day! It will fly through a movie compressing it in real time or faster! My only complaint is it will not do AC3 passthrough, so I still have to use Handbrake for those movies I want to keep in surround sound, but for home movies, and stuff off my Tivo, this is great!
 Works as advertised, but... February 27, 2008
Geeniusatwrok (Boston, MA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Turbo.264 really did speed up the conversion of multiple types of video to h.264 on my old Powermac G5, but you have to compare the results with other tools. As my needs don't require h.264 any longer (I sold my AppleTV), I have found that Handbrake set to encode to MP4/AC3 is much faster on my new iMac 2.4, sometimes hundreds of FPS, and the file size is generally comparable, sometimes even smaller, and the quality is far better. Handbrake will also generate h.264, but of course it is much slower. If you don't require that format, you don't need this product.
Here's some problems with the Turbo.264:
* There are very few controls in the software
* If the source contains subtitles in alternate tracks, it ignores them. If the subtitles are "burned" into the video, no problem, but this is generally only true for older material.
* It does a terrible job with multi-episode sources and tends to mash them together in a useless blob. Handbrake lets you break out each episode as a separate video which is much easier to manage.
* In many cases I've converted stuff only to find a week/month/etc later that the audio and video are so out of sync that it is unwatchable. In one case the audio was about 30 seconds behind the video.
* Assuming the sync is OK and there's no subtitles, the resulting video is quite soft compared to the results from Handbrake, at least viewed in QT Player and Front Row.
* output is limited to a maximum of 800pix wide. HD material is severely degraded.
* It cannot handle input in Matroska nor unprotected WMV formats. With the former it will appear to work but only at 1-2 FPS. With the latter it will work if you have paid for the full Flip4Mac package; otherwise you get a nice spam banner across the video. You have to use VisualHub for this junk.
For quickie conversions it is fine. For quality conversions with multi-episodic and/or subtitled material, forget it, the sync problem is random and infuriating, and you are far better off with HandBrake or VisualHub unless you have an older PowerPC Mac.
Disappointing Speed On Mini, MBP; ZERO STARS for UPS Delivery! February 8, 2008
Trust Me! (Virginia)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm very disappointed with the reduction in the time it takes to convert AVIs to MP4s/M4Vs. I was hoping for a halving of the encoding time, but I'm actually getting about a 25% reduction. Examples: On the 10.5.1 MacBook Pro, one 22-minute TV show took about 13.5 minutes to convert to iPhone format with the Turbo.264, but QuickTime alone only took 17 minutes. Another show, about 45 minutes in length, took 29 minutes with Turbo.264 and 39 minutes without. Right now, the 10.4.11 Mac Mini is in the midst of converting 12 videos and it looks like it'll take about 9 hours. This is not what I was expecting for $100.
I didn't formally test how much (if any) more responsive the system was, but the Mac Mini did seem less burdened by the tasks with Turbo.264. The MBP didn't seem to care whether I used the Turbo.264 or not.
I'm not a video connoisseur, but the Turbo.264 video seemed equivalent to the QT video. It looks good on the iPhone and AppleTV.
To add insult to injury, UPS royally screwed up the delivery. I paid for Next Day Air delivery. Amazon's email indicated a Tuesday delivery, as did UPS' website. The package sat at a UPS facility in Harrisburg, PA for over 30 hours. Later in its journey, it visited Louisville, KY, then Columbus, OH, then back to Louisville, KY! Did they take my package sightseeing?!?!? It finally arrived on Thursday afternoon. Three days for Next Day Air? Thanks UPS! Normally it takes the US Postal Service to screw things up this badly!
Support is HORRIBLE February 7, 2008
J. Thomas (Portland, OR USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can not comment on the product. Seemed to work twice, now it is dead. However, ElGato's support is HORRIBLE. Whatever their products I would recommend thinking twice before buying a product form them.
1) Online support is all there is. I can find no way to actually talk to someone.
2) Response time is SLOW. I filed my initial question, it took almost 2 weeks to get the first boiler plate try this try that (which didn't help) reply from them and now I am waiting for a reply back from my "it didn't work tell me how to get an exchange" email. We are going on 16 days and counting and my problem is NO WHERE close to being resolved.
If you really had a complicated problem I don't see how you could get it resolved.
I think they took a big hit from selling a lot of stuff at MacWorld 2008 and are having problems responding, but this is totally unacceptable.
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