The Elgato Turbo.264 HD is designed to do only one thing. But sometimes things designed that way are best. Sure, a Leatherman has a ton of functions, but have you ever tried to actually use one? They are awkward and hard to handle, not the best tool for the job. Fortunately, Elgato ain’t no Leatherman.
In the box you’ll find the Turbo.264 HD, a USB extension cable and the application disk, with the license key on the back of the sleeve. Install the software from the disk, and be sure to let it check for updates, I had one the first time I ran it. Plug in the Turbo.264 and you are ready to convert.
Just drag whatever media you want to convert to the Turbo screen. This can be anything from a movie clip, something from your camcorder, or even a DVD (as long as it is not encrypted). If you drag in a DVD that has multiple episodes or videos, the Turbo software will show each clip and you can select which ones you want, and if you want to make them into one long movie instead of individual clips. This will also work by dragging several movies to the Turbo software and telling it to create one long movie.
Once you select the media you want to convert, a pop-up menu appears on the right of the window letting you select the output. The default profiles will probably be fine for the majority of users, but you do have the option of setting a custom profile. I’ve been using the HD 720P profile for use with my media center since my HDTV is 720P. If the source media isn’t of 720P resolution, it will encode it at the source’s native resolution.
Surprisingly, the supplied app is pretty feature complete. If you accidentally record too much, or want to edit out part of a movie, you can do that too, all from within the Turbo app. Click the movie preview, and a larger size preview will be shown with a timeline along the bottom which you can use to edit the movie.
Once the Turbo is done encoding your movie, you can have it automatically add it to iTunes or leave it in a specified folder if that is your choice. If you are encoding for YouTube, it asks for your YouTube login credentials and will automatically upload the movie when it is done.
Of course, the highlight of the Turbo.264 is that it’s not limited to just using the supplied application. The Turbo can be used to speed up encode tasks from QuickTime, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, EyeTV and any other application that support the QuickTime engine.
To the test
The Turbo.264 HD is fast. I was used to using Handbrake to encode media for my media center. Handbrake takes about 150 minutes to encode a 3 hour movie, while it took the Turbo to encode the same movie 80 minutes, with approximately the same settings. Encoding a short 2.5 minute clip for the iPhone takes the Turbo about 70 seconds, while it took over 140 seconds for Handbrake. When I first hooked up the Turbo, I expected my CPU usage to go down when using it over using Handbrake. CPU usage was still pretty high, but with the addition of the Turbo’s hardware, encoding was much faster. Just be warned, if viewing flash, the Turbo’s encoding speed takes a significant hit, and will go much slower.
Probably the biggest drawback of the Turbo.264 HD is that it only works apps which use the QuickTime engine. You can’t use it with apps like Handbrake or any other FFMpeg engine based encoder, even though it can output with the same codec.
The Turbo.264 HD requires an Intel Mac, 512MB of RAM, with Leopard on it, so any Mac of recent vintage can use it. Elgato’s Turbo.264 HD goes for $149.99, but you can find it for $129.95 from Amazon.
