Elgato Turbo.264 Hd

[dwp11]

New Toast user here. I am running a MacPro 2x2 dual core Intel Xeon with 10 gigs of memory. New things I have used Toast to burn to DVD have taken a long time, sometimes as much as 24 hours. I was wondering of anyone uses the Elgato Turbo.264 HD stick and if it actually speeds up the encoding process enough to justify buying one.

[tsantee]

Please describe the specs and length of the video that took 24 hours to create and what was it you were having Toast make. The Turbo264 HD is only used in Toast to convert video to a few of the presets in the Convert window such as the AppleTV preset. You probably need to ask in the ElGato forums or possibly in Apple's MacPro forum about how much faster the Turbo might encode on your Mac.

[dwp11]

It was a one hour and fifty minute mp4 file with avc1 encoder, 1280 x 688, Millions AAC, 5.1 (C L R Ls Rs LFE), 48000 khz, 23.98 fps with a file size of 3 gb. I have not checked the other forums yet, thought I would start here. Thanks for replying so quickly.

[dwp11]

It was a one hour and fifty minute mp4 file with avc1 encoder, 1280 x 688, Millions AAC, 5.1 (C L R Ls Rs LFE), 48000 khz, 23.98 fps with a file size of 3 gb. I have not checked the other forums yet, thought I would start here. Thanks for replying so quickly. I was trying to make a DVD for playing on my DVD player. Just looked at the Elgato forum and it looks like it would be no help for doingt= this as I do not have an AppleTV.

[tsantee]

It was a one hour and fifty minute mp4 file with avc1 encoder, 1280 x 688, Millions AAC, 5.1 (C L R Ls Rs LFE), 48000 khz, 23.98 fps with a file size of 3 gb. I have not checked the other forums yet, thought I would start here. Thanks for replying so quickly. I was trying to make a DVD for playing on my DVD player. Just looked at the Elgato forum and it looks like it would be no help for doingt= this as I do not have an AppleTV.

A standard-definition video DVD is MPEG 2 so the Turbo264 is no help in that. Also, Toast doesn't use that device when encoding for Blu-ray discs, either.

 

It does take a long time to rescale HD video to SD but 24 hours for a 2-hour movie on your Mac seems very excessive to me. One concern I have is how well Toast did in handling the 24 fps source. Let me know if the final DVD is playing smoothly. That does seem to be an issue with the Blu-ray disc encoding from 24 fps sources. Typically a 1280 video is 1280x720 so I wonder if that has anything to do with the extended time. Toast converts the audio to 2.0, by the way.

 

If this is going to be a common video source for you then I think you should consider other options to converting as a SD video DVD. There are various ways to stream the video to HDTVs and there are TVs and devices that can play the video after its copied to a USB storage device. The only benefit in making a video DVD is if you plan to share it with others or you don't have a HDTV.

 

I can't explain why it took so long on your Mac. I would have expected it to take much less time to encode, just as I'm sure you expected.

[dwp11]

Unfortunately I do not have a HDTV, so transferring to DVD appears to be my best option, I reckon. The DVD played flawlessly and had a great looking picture. Someone suggested Handbrake, but I am unfamiliar with it. At one time I used DivX for compression, but it was slow and if I did any editing on the DivX video file it would scatter briefly at the edit point. Once again, thanks for your quick responses. I have been disabled since I crashed my Norton in '07 and damaged my spinal cord, so although I do a lot of time on my hands I do not have a lot of funds to try out a lot of these new devices and technology that is now available.

[tsantee]

Unfortunately I do not have a HDTV, so transferring to DVD appears to be my best option, I reckon. The DVD played flawlessly and had a great looking picture. Someone suggested Handbrake, but I am unfamiliar with it. At one time I used DivX for compression, but it was slow and if I did any editing on the DivX video file it would scatter briefly at the edit point. Once again, thanks for your quick responses. I have been disabled since I crashed my Norton in '07 and damaged my spinal cord, so although I do a lot of time on my hands I do not have a lot of funds to try out a lot of these new devices and technology that is now available.

My advice is to stick with Toast. Hopefully future encodings will go faster. Glad to know the video looked great (as it should). You might want to try encoding at the "Better" setting to see if that speeds things up (or slows them down). The Best setting is the one to choose if there is lots of action or motion in the video.

[dwp11]

I will give that a try. Once again, thank you.