Elgato turbocharges H.264 export on Mac

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:03

Your IT - Home IT

Following a rumour that Apple may introduce hardware video transcoding on future Macs, Elgato has announced a hardware H.264 encoder packaged as a USB stick.

The Turbo.264 accelerates H.264 encoding by a factor of four on an Intel Core 2 Duo Mac or an even more impressive factor of ten on a G4-based Mac. In practice, this means a 10 minute DV clip can be exported to H.264 for Apple TV in 11 minutes 17 seconds instead of almost an hour on an unassisted 2GHz MacBook Core 2 Duo.

The H.264 format is used by the iPod, Apple TV, Sony PlayStation Portable, certain mobile phones and other devices. Transcoding digital TV recordings (eg, those made using Elgato's EyeTV software and a compatible tuner) can be worthwhile even if the plan is to play them back on the same computer, as H.264 gives good quality with relatively small files. However, Turbo.264 only supports resolutions up to 800 by 600, so it isn't suitable for HD recordings unless you're happy for scaling to occur.

The Turbo.264's software provides drag-and-drop conversion of single or multiples files with presets for iPod (standard or high quality), Apple TV and PSP. Exported files are automatically added to the computer's iTunes library. It also accelerates H.264 export from iMovie, QuickTime Pro, Final Cut Pro, EyeTV and other video applications that use QuickTime. Files using nonstandard codecs such as those provided by Flip4Mac can be converted to H.264 with the aid of Turbo.264.

Turbo.264 retails for $US99.95/€99.95 from the company's online store and is also available through distributors (including Conexus in Australia, where the RRP is $A199.95).