Digital TrendsTechnology news and Product Reviews

Elgato Turbo.264 Review

Write a Review

Write a User Review


  1. Mark Wise •  August 16, 2007
    Rating: 3.5/5

    Okay….I bought the turbo because around half my MP4 movies failed to appear on my AppleTV, though iTunes on my old mac mini had no problem with them. And half meant a ‘lot’ of time re-encoding….

    For starters, the Turbo.264 is faster then doing it without. No question. However, as always there are drawbacks. If the file fails to convert (for whatever reason) Turbo.264 stops. Completely. And whatever files you had in your queue sit and wait for user intervention. Not good for overnight stints of conversions.

    Also, whilst I could run another conversion program (VisualHub) at the same time that doesn’t use the elgato hardware to convert, and it had no effect on Turbo’s conversion speed, simply copying files from my machine across a 100mbps network had enormous impact. Infact, the Turbo.264 became an absolute snail, performing at even slower speeds then VisualHub. Why this simple file movement would have such an impact is one for the engineers to answer.

    Overall….worth buying, but not the absolute perfect product I’d hoped for.

    Rating: 7 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  2. CBI •  January 27, 2009
    Rating: 4/5

    I could not praise this product enough! It has done wonders for my encoding. Before a regular 1hr30 movie would take well over 5 hours to convert to iPhone using Handbrake on my G4 Powerbook, but with the Turbo 264, it takes about an 1hr50! Massive change indeed! I’m not sure if it would be much use to anyone with a newer mac model, but for those using G4′s or less, you need this in your life!

    Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 1 people found this user review helpful.

competitors