H/W video compression using Elgato turbo.264 HD USB dongle

[DarfWeder]

Hi,

I have just gotten hold of the Elgato Turbo.264 HD USB dongle that can be used to do hardware compression of video files.

First results seem to be pretty good. Considering the price of below 90 euros, I am happy so far. I had the choice or was looking at upgrading the i3-550 to an i7-870 but the price tag of about 280-300 euros was just not realistic when you only stuck in 400 to start with...

The dongle seemed to be a good compromise and is portable to other machines as well of course, and it does work with my hackintosh...It's just not a given that things works on a hackintosh when it is designed for mac, but you got a fair chance.

I have only done a conversion of full HD (avchd) to iPhone format but it went really fast. It was doing about 100 fps and sometimes over and sometimes under. It took about 10 minutes to convert 35 minutes of clips in the application that comes with the dongle. Output was about 320MB and so that is fab for the iPhone. It looked pretty decent too. Not stunning but I guess we can still tweak stuff.

I don't think I have seen anyone talk about it and the search here for elgato but seems it is not really popular. I will do some more testing, but I am still wondering a bit about the workflow. iMovie to cut the clips, then elgato to convert it to HD 720p or 1080p and then iDVD to burn it? I previously used iMovie (11) and then sent it to iDVD to burn. A 1.5 hr movie took 3 hours to do this way, so I am hoping to cut some time here as that truly isn't much fun.

Anybody using it?

(Oh yes I bought it on amazon too!)

 

[eilfurz]

i'm using the elgato as well - it's a nice tool but for me not reliable enough (sometimes it makes ugly encoding errors) to use it for anything other than the odd quick rip or preview-videos that have to go to the customer asap.

your workflow is a bit strange - iDVD is a (SD-)DVD authoring tool. SD-DVDs use the mpeg2 codec, the elgato the h.264 codec. it would just recompress and resize your freshly compressed HD Video even more. and probably take even longer than if you'd used the original source from imovie.

so, you'd either export to a high-bitrate HD-video (e.g. prores codec in export to quicktime - > quicktime) and then quickly convert it to a h.264 with the elgato if you want to watch it from a hd-capable source (TV, Mediaplayer, iOS) or convert and resize it to DVD-Video format using iDVD, so it can be played on an old standalone DVD Player.

also, don't use the elgato to recompress .mkv files to something like .m4v so it can be played on the iphone. it will work - but a lot of .mkv files are already in the right format, they just need to be "rewrapped" - use a tool like mp4tools instead.

 

[TedSelvaggio]

Two other applications that take advantage of it, are Toast Titanium and Quicktime 7 Pro