Digital Trends

Elgato Turbo.264 July 9th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup & Use

Getting the Turbo.264 set up on your Mac computer is quite easy. Pop the CD in and drag the Turbo.264 app into your Applications folder. The whole app is only about 9.8MB, so it takes up very little room on your hard drive. My entire installation took 12 seconds, start to finish.

Once the Turbo.264 app is installed, plug in the Turbo.264 USB device into your Mac. Don't expect the Turbo.264 to show up as a drive — it's a video encoder, not a flash card. 

Open the Turbo.264 application, and in 1–2 seconds, it'll be ready to encode your video files. You can quickly drag and drop any number of video files into the Turbo.264 app window, and it'll prep each for batch conversion. Select the desired output file type (iPod High Quality, iPod Standard, Sony PSP, or Apple TV) and click "start." You'll see the progress indicators keeping you informed of the conversion progress, much like old-school analog tripometers in a car. As the conversion nears completion, the countdown switches from minutes to seconds. When done, the app signals successful conversion with an upbeat "ding!"

Drag and Drop your Files Here

If you use Final Cut (Pro or Express), iMovie, or QuickTime Pro, you can export video files from these apps with the assistance of the Turbo.264 hardware. In any of those apps, select Export, then click the drop-down menu that gives you file format options. You'll see the newly added Turbo.264-assisted options for iPod, PSP, and Apple TV [e.g. Movie to Apple TV (Elgato Turbo.264)]. Select the desired format, and away you go — the Turbo.264 will help your app of choice convert the video.

Test Conversions 

I ran several conversions to compare against Elgato's conversion stats. The test file was an avi file, 39 minutes, 52 seconds, 350.5MB.

MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo

Turbo.264 to iPod High – 17m 35s, 333.9MB file, 60fps average
Turbo.264 to iPod Standard – 7m 48s, 197.1MB file, 120fps average
Turbo.264 to Sony PSP – 11m 05s, 231.5MB file, 117fps average
Turbo.264 to Apple TV – 17m 49s, 397MB file, 50fps average
Turbo.264 assist QTPro to Apple TV – 17m 36s, 397MB file
QTPro (no assist) to Apple TV – 58m 36s, 486.1MB file (yikes!)
VisualHub to Apple TV – 13m 50s, 159.9MB file

Other sample conversions on slower machines are as follows: one-hour DV video converted to Apple TV format.

1.25GHz G4 iMac without Turbo.264 – 23h 06m
1.25GHz G4 iMac with Turbo.264 – 1h 50m

1.8GHz G5 PowerMac without Turbo.264 – 9h 10m
1.8GHz G5 PowerMac with Turbo.264 – 1h 30m

2GHz MacBook C2D without Turbo.264 – 4h 21m
2GHz MacBook C2D with Turbo.264 – 1h 06m

As you can see, the slower the computer, the greater support Turbo.264 gives.