Elgato Turbo.264
By Matt Serrano
July 11, 2007

Encoding video is not normally ones idea of fun, but Elgato promises to take out some of the pain for Mac users by making the process up to 4x faster, with their Turbo.264. Does it live up to it's claims, and more importantly, is it worth your $100?

Video encoding is a boring process. Let's face it, if getting the media you want on your computer isn't a hassle, encoding it is. The last thing anyone wants to do is waste time waiting for a video to finish encoding, and depending on the machine doing the work, it can take hours leaving the rest of the computer useless.

Dedicating an entire system is out of the question, because it can be noisy, suck up power and still take hours to get your videos in the format you want. Thankfully if you're using a Mac, Elgato is trying to offer a solution that can speed up the process. Probably best known for their EyeTV lineup of TV tuners and recorders, the company's is offering a product called the Turbo.264, a dongle that serves as a hardware-based H.264 encoder specifically designed for the iPod and Apple TV.

Not only that, but they promise the increased speeds can be up to four times faster (on Intel Macs). complete articleThe other big promise is leaving system resources virtually untouched. Ideally you would be able to start encoding a video and still be able to use your system with no performance hit.

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