Elgato readies USB H.264 encoding
updated 01:55 pm EDT, Tue April 3, 2007
Elgato Turbo 264
TV tuner maker Elgato is today branching out into dedicated video encoders with the turbo.264 USB adapter. Similar to the ADS InstantVideo-To-Go, the Elgato device includes a dedicated video encoder that can dramatically accelerate the process of converting video to the more efficient H.264 format to assist slower computers or speed up larger projects, the company says. The turbo.264 was born with Macs in mind and includes Elgato's own Mac OS X software as well as a QuickTime plugin for converting footage for most any Mac program.
Shipments of the USB encoder are scheduled to begin in late April at a price of 99 Euros ($132). An official US launch date and price point are currently unavailable.
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This is great news. I have lots of video content I want to convert into h.264 for it's high quality at small file sizes, but haven't done it yet because it would tie up my Mac for years. With this device, I can do it and still use my Mac for other things.
Now, why don't we have Mac drivers for any video card with h.264 playback acceleration? There are cheap cards for Windows that will speed up the decompression of h.264, MPEG2, DivX, and WMV. I would love to have one of those on my Mac.