Product Reviews

Turbo.264 is a relatively cheap bundle aimed at addressing the time taken to encode H.264 video, specifically for Apple TV, iPod and Sony PlayStation Portable.

It consists of software and a USB 2.0 hardware H.264 encoder - similar in size to a large USB memory key. The software includes a batch processing application and a QuickTime component that adds Turbo.264 presets to QuickTime Pro and other applications. This allows you to trim or edit files in, say, iMovie and export using Turbo.264's presets. Like Apple's device presets, Elgato's can't be customised, although the company confirmed that it will address this with an update.

Turbo.264 also integrates with Elgato's EyeTV 2.4, with corresponding device presets using the hardware-based export.

Dragging a video file or VIDEO_TS folder from an unprotected DVD into the application's window adds it to the batch. VOB sequences are treated as single files.You can apply one of four presets to items: High and Standard for iPod, plus Apple TV and PSP. Press the Start button to add output to the iTunes library or a folder specified in the application's preferences.

You will have to set metadata and poster frames in iTunes after encoding. Also, the PSP preset didn't generate a thumbnail file for PSP's Cross Media Bar.

Turbo.264 supports the usual input formats: various flavours of Mpeg (1, 2 and 4), along with anything that plays in QuickTime. When converting from WMV, we found that Flip4Mac watermarked output, though this stems from Flip4Mac; we had the same result from Roxio

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Crunch. Former Windows users who want to convert their home movies from Windows Movie Maker should bear this in mind.

We tested Turbo.264's performance with a 15-minute video, in two likely formats for user-created content: a DVD and a QuickTime (DV PAL) file. The performance boost is impressive even on a late-generation PowerBook G4. Only the Apple TV preset taxed all of our test Macs - a G4, G5 and MacBook Pro - while other presets gave around 29fps for iPod High export on a G4, and up to around 115fps for iPod Standard and Sony PSP encoding on the MacBook Pro. Even the G4 coped well with encoding while doing basic web browsing.

Encoding other formats is affected by factors such as the complexity of decoding the source, the chosen preset and bandwidth on the host Mac. While DV wasn't particularly taxing for our PowerBook, a 720p WMV file slowed encoding to 13fps, although that's still respectable compared with software encoders.

When we inspected the output, files encoded from DV and EyeTV appeared slightly darker than those exported from QuickTime Pro. The Apple TV export resulted in smoothing of jagged edges, and a slight loss of sharpness elsewhere in the picture. Turbo.264 also preserves anamorphic video rather than scaling it, and we noticed that QuickTime Pro's High Quality and Deinterlace options were enabled on this export too.

The hardware has a maximum output resolution of 800 x 600, so HD exports are not possible, but this should only affect owners of both HD camcorders and Apple TV. HD output is completely irrelevant for the other two platforms. We were more disappointed with PSP support, which conforms to frame sizes for pre-3.30 firmware (368 x 208 and 320 x 240) rather than the full 480 x 272 that's now possible. Elgato says it may address this issue, depending on user demand.

Clearly the performance benefits are phenomenal, and we hope that iPhone support will be added soon. We have some very minor concerns about image quality. Otherwise, Turbo.264 is a well-priced product that offers good performance; we simply want Elgato to unlock its full potential by allowing custom presets.