Remember that brilliant
Turbo.264 video conversion dongle that shipped like, two whole years ago? Yeah, it's successor has just hit the streets, and it's as ready as ever for 1080p content. The predictably titled
Elgato Turbo.264 HD plugs directly into one's Mac and converts files up to 1080p (from camcorders, digital cameras, etc.) into files that are perfectly formatted for iPods, PSPs or other media players. The bundled software also lets users preview and trim video clips before converting, and it saves folks the time and hassle of importing into iMovie, learning commands, rendering and exporting. Reportedly, a video that would take an hour to convert to an iPod-friendly file takes just 15 minutes with this here dongle, and if that's worth $149.95 to you, you're one click away from brightening your own day.
[Via
Electricpig]
posted Mar 19th 2009 6:11PM
how could this small usb device do the work of a full processor that much faster?
Dedicated hardware is always faster at doing exactly that task than general purpose hardware, such as the Core 2 Intel CPUs.
Accelerators are the key to the future of working with HD content. The more you can offload to an accelerator like this, or the graphics card, the less CPU you'll use, the less power you'll consume, and the less heat you'll put out.
One day PCs will consist of multiple processors dedicated to specific tasks.. Wait, it's already happening! The GPU is only the start.
they don't say it speeds it up. They say "it HELPS to speed this up".
Which is another way of saying that this is an overglorified USB stick with the program on it, and your CPU will do all the processing.
@Pretol: The Turbo.264, and the HD product are dedicated H.264 encoder processor/SoC (system on chip) devices. The H.264 encoding is off-loaded to this device, and the encoded frames are re-assembled by the software. You can watch your CPU load go down significantly when these devices are in use, as they are no longer performing the heavy lifting.
Pretol = FUD merchant.
Do some research, learn the facts, and don't post stupidly inaccurate comments that make you look moronic.
@RioRyan
That's the way the many of the original IBM XT PCs were, full of dedicated processors that one day became obsolete by faster CPU's.
Here's a short list of items that once had their own dedicated processor but (for the most part) not anymore:
Keyboards
Mice
Sound Devices
Modems (Win-modems removed the processor)
Desktop grade NICs (some server NICs still have a dedicated I/O chip)
Desktop grade RAID chips (servers still have dedicated processor)
Serial Ports used to have their own processor (USB did away with that, the CPU now does the work)
DVD Decoders used to require their own processor, now it's done on the CPU.
Video Encoding (from Analog) used to require it's own processor, now it can be done on the CPU.
In the future, basic video tasks will be handled by the CPU; basic home users like grandma may not have a need for a GPU when a CPU will do, though GPUs will still exist for advanced uses.
Some math used to require a Co-processor in the 386/486 days. Now it's incorporated in the CPU.
Or you know, you could build a PC with Quad Core and get HandBrake to utilize all the cores..
True, you could do that... but if you have a laptop as shown above, you really don't have that option yet to just drop in a lot of cores.
The best scenario is something like this that can work in tandem with a bunch of cores so that the entire task scales with the number of cores, plus the accelerator.
That's totally more cost effective. Build a whole quad core PC instead of buying this $150 USB device.
Makes total sense to me!
This accelerator is faster than a Quad Core processor. On that laptop, which has a Core2Duo (two cores), the speed increase is 4x. Even if the efficiency is 100%, the quad core would still be 2x as slow.
dedicated H.264 hardware helps speed up the conversion. The older model was great, until you tried to use it on an intel mac. The intel hardware didnt really see any speed increases. I stopped using mine
I didn't get one of the originals because it was limited to DVD resolution. This new one doesn't have that limitation.
On Intel Macs, the speed up was minimal, but the reduction of CPU utilization was worth it. Instead of running your CPU at 100%, you ran your CPU at 10-20%. That way you can browse Engadget without a significant performance hit. :)
NO EFFING WAY!
You can get a Cowon O2PMP and bypass all the conversion crap and save $149.95. Actually, I got my 8GB O2 for $139.99 from Amazon. Firmware is better than I expected.
Yeah, because I want to put hundreds of gigs of DV on a portable player. That makes sense.
Why isn't this available for PC as well?
because Elgato makes hardware and software for Macs.
Will it work the other way? As in, rip a dvd (that you own legally of course), and then convert to H.264 really fast?
You need to decrypt the DVD first. Elgato would probably get sued if their software did the decryption. It'll compress the decrypted VIDEO_TS to h.264, though.
"it is successor has just hit the streets"
Nope, doesn't make sense. I'll read it again. Maybe the apostrophe is unnecessary.
"its successor has just hit the streets"
Oh, okay. Yeah, I totally get it now.
::Sarcasm::
That makes sense to you.
This looks nice. I'd like to see some review on it. Because although converting H264 with these hardware are much faster and more efficient to do than using the computer, the quality usually suffers and the file size are not as small as the software H264 encoders running on the computers...
Yep, rip with Mac The Ripper and transcode with Elgato.
http://elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/Accessories/Turbo264HD/product2.en.html#dvd
I agree – the video you got out of the first device was appalling compared to HandBrake's output; the win was convenience. If the video from this hardware is any better, I'm intrigued... but then, HandBrake (specifically, the x264 library it uses) is tremendously faster and gives even better video now.
Ya, it's a battle between convenience and quality. But for something I will be storing long term, I'd use Handbrake. I do have the original Turbo H.264 usb device, but I didn't get much use of it because I lean more toward quality.
I would be interested in a simular device that worked with PC's and supported DiVx or Xvid.
perfect for mac users, I guess, especially the part they pay $150 + tax for this thing, I will stay with some freeware that does the same and more
*whoosh*
Did you hear that?
That's the fact that this is dedicated HARDWARE not software going right over your head. No matter how efficient of software you write, it's still not going to give a GMA950 any more graphics processing power at the end of the day.
;)
Um, it does not do the same to have any single piece of freeware that exists anywhere because the selling point of this product is the hardware encoding thats way faster. There is literally no other reason to own one of these. So your point is completely wrong. For many who do tons of encoding this is a blessing. For everyone else, stick to freeware and slowness. Hopefully Apple will add hardware H.264 encoders to their machines at some point. That would be awesome. If they did that, then your statement would be true.
"It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people wonder if you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove any doubt."
Hmm, bar that one subjective comparison, there doesn't seem to be much info on speed. If it _always_ converts in realtime (a reasonable, but not necessarily true, assumption), then it's going to be way faster than all but maybe the most powerful Mac Pro when converting HD... but slower than any C2D Mac when converting SD (iPod) resolutions. My MacBook cranks out up to 80fps (3.2x) when I'm converting video for my iPhone, for example.
Now if it converted my Bluray movies to Apple TV that would be bitching. O wait... Mac's don't come with Blu drives...
Out of interest, why are you trolling in a thread about a Mac product that (by the sound of it) you have no use for?
Busy day?
Big Boy, let me clue you in. Macs work with 3rd party BD readers just fine, internal and external. I got about 25 Blu-ray movies in my Apple TV library, all ripped and encoded on my Mac.
Now go crawl back in your hole and don't post stuff of which you know nothing about.
mac boo ray ripping?a link, hint, lead, or surely you jest.....(imagines that holy grail)
Yes boomsilent, it is real. You do need Parallels/XP to run Slysoft AnyDVD blu-ray ripper.. and let Handbrake do the rest.
Wow, ripping 24 BD titles at about 24GB each in Windows XP then compressing them seems easy for you? You must be really patient because I'd skip that and just buy a stand alone BD player, or *gasp* build a proper HTPC running Vista Media Centre.
I love my original Turbo.264, but $150 for the HD model? I don't know if x4 the amount of time is even worth that.
nVidia and ATI should just place dedicated encoding logic into their new GPUs, just like they do with the decoding hardware.. I know they are doing encoding with their CUDA/Stream GPGPU stuff, but that is still not as efficient as a small dedicated unit...
No way. I've bought the previous Turbo.264 dongle 2 years ago and still get LOTS of unusable files (out of sync audio, etc). I've have to check out every single video and have to re-convert lots of them with third party software, not always with success.
Elgato support forum is full of complaints but they don't seem to care to release software updates... and now they release a new version?!
Do yourself a favor, don't waste your money with this dongle!!
So far this product hasn't been demonstrated to be anything particularly remarkable.
Given what other products are on the market, it's hard to believe that something the
size of an ATSC tuner is going to run circles around a Hauppauge 1212 or even a
normal (respectably fast) CPU.
"HD h264" can be a very misleading term. This can be anything from stuff that any
recent mini will handle with no sweat to something that trip up some of the fastest
cores currently available.
"downgrading" to an ipod suitable format is also pretty lightweight stuff. A fast single
core can already easily do that for SD content at 300fps.
@hulse_kevin:
I don't think the comparison to the Hauppauge 1212 HD PVR is appropriate. I view them as complimentary.
That box takes Component (or crappier formats) and churns out .m2ts files.
The ElGato takes files and churns out other format files.
While the 1212's output files are suitable for immediate playback via a Networked Media Tank (or VLC, if you're poor) or for Blu-ray authoring, that's about it.
If you want to turn those into something that someone else without a Blu-ray player can watch, then the ElGato comes in handy - it produces (with "HD 1080p" output chosen) .mp4 files with AAC audio that play in both QuickTime Player and VLC.
This device would be great for me, because the 25 Mbps 1080i AVCHD .mts files my Canon HD camcorder produces totally choke VLC on my old 2.16 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro. They're basically unwatchable unless I can convert them.
Yep, i'm with you on that. What's the point in Encoding a DVD to HD resolution? It's not going to make the picture look any better, it doesn't work like that.
Now if it can take an unprotected HD-DVD or Blu ray image and encode that, then thats a different story, but until someone actually tells me it can do that then it is a waste of money.
I still cant use my standard T.264 it groups all titles of my DVDs together, and any other format such as an AVI just pixelates on every attempt. Their support says "Handbrake works around the DVD authoring issue and we have a feature request in our database to do the same. I don't know when that will happen with Turbo."
So what the hell does that mean, wait another 6 months till they can be bothered releasing a new version with fixes.
I have been in contact with the staff at Elgato. I will attach the testing information they sent to me. I also had one of the original Turbo 264 and the performance enhancements were not there when using it with my Core2Dual iMAC. Here are the numbers:
We don't have official comparison charts to share yet, but here is a taste - I ran some quick tests.
My Mac is a iMac 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.5.6.
I took a 60 second long 1080i EyeTV recording (from an episode of Heroes).
••• Apple TV format •••
Exported from EyeTV (Quicktime) - 160 seconds to complete
Exported using Turbo.264 - 106 seconds to complete
Exported using Turbo.264 HD - 62 seconds to complete
••• 1080p format •••
Exported from EyeTV (Quicktime, "H.264" option) - 399 seconds to complete
Exported using Turbo.264 HD - 92 seconds to complete
Please note that the faster your Mac is, the faster Turbo.264 HD can export.
Also, export speed depends on the source material - my EyeTV recordings are MPEG-2 Transport Streams.
I just ordered the new unit from OWC so will know for sure by the end of the week...
I've been using a Turbo.264 HD for about a week now. I'm converting 1920x1080 content into 960x540 h.264 files at a target bit rate of 4000kbps. (Those settings produce quite satisfactory results when running a pure software converter.) On my 2.16GHz C2D iMac, the Turbo.264 HD dongle conversion is about twice as fast as the pure software conversion, but the resulting video is notably less detailed. For me, a 2x conversion speedup is not worth the tradeoff in quality. Also, during the Turbo.264 HD conversion, my machine's CPU is quite busy; I presume it's busy transcoding the source material into a format suitable for feeding to the Turbo.264 HD converter.
To sum up my experience:
Speedup: reasonable.
Quality: disappointing.
CPU economization: nil.
Overall: not worth it.
Okay, so I got this little piece of hardware and have been using it quite extensively.
Bottom line: I'm amazed.
I have this setup: AppleTV, LG 50PG7000 (1080p), sitting about 3 meters away from it.
Notebook: newest MacBook Pro
These things I did:
Convert DVD (using Fairmount to decrypt it on-the-fly) to x264 at 1500kbps: quality is perfect, transcodes at about 120fps, so get the job done _really_ fast, produces a file of about 1.5GB
Convert 720p mkv to x264 at 4500kbps: the quality is simply amazing, files are big (obviously), transcodes at about 70fps, one episode of 24 S07 (43min) takes about 15min to finish
Convert regular tv show episode to x264 at about 1250kbps: quality on my 1080p tv is still acceptable (yes, a little bit blurry ;-)), trascodes at about 160fps
Finally: converting 1080p Bluray-Rip mkv to x264 at 4500kbps: big files, transcodes at about 40fps, quality is, obviously, excellent
To put these numbers into perspective: trascoding with Handbrake on my new MacBook Pro takes forever at about 10fps
What I can agree with, is that CPU utilization is quite high with big and complex source files (such as 720p or 1080p mkv). The speed improvements do, nevertheless, outweigh that con. :)
Cheers
The problem I have with the Elgato 264HD is the audio. We are talking about enjoying High Definition video. I would expect audio is at least at standard level. I am so surprised and disappointed that AC3 and subtitle are not even supported. Given that the speed of conversion if faster but exchanging for $150 + sub-standard audio + no subtitles + worse video quality is a bad deal. I am so excited when I see the word HD, but w/o AC3 and subtitles, the Elgato 264HD is unsuited as a media player.
Mike