Featured Review

Review: Toshiba Portege R700
ASIO Having recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the laptop, Toshiba has delivered a clutch of new notebooks to the market. The Portege name has long been recognised as one of the premiere small notebooks on the market. We took their latest model, the R700, out for a spin. ...read more

No. 1 Story

Construction needs cloud flexibility

Australia’s embattled construction sector could benefit from cloud based information systems that can be switched on and off in lockstep with individual projects – with the exception of those organisations based in remote areas like the Kimberleys.

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Elgato Turbo.264 HD

Elgato's Turbo.264 HD speeds video export intended for various Apple (and other) devices, but is it value for money?


The Turbo.264 HD is a Mac-compatible hardware accelerator for H.264 encoding. It comes from Elgato, a company well known for its TV tuners and supporting software.

The device itself resembles a slightly obese thumb drive. Elgato recommends plugging it directly into the computer, which may present a slight problem for owners of iMacs that have just three USB ports.

The first port probably takes care of your mouse and keyboard (unless you're using wireless peripherals), and you may be using that one with an unpowered hub to allow easy access to thumb drives.

You're unlikely to be interested in the Turbo.264 HD unless you also own a TV tuner, and our experience is that they generally work better when connected directly to a computer and not via a hub. And the main point of using a Turbo.264 HD is to prepare content for an iPhone or similar device, and again, direct connection seems preferable to an unpowered hub.

So you may need to unplug either the tuner or the iPod/iPhone cable to use the Turbo.264 HD. Since current iMacs have four USB ports, so that's another excuse for an upgrade!

What about the software? See page 2.