Convert Video for iTunes® and YouTube™

First and foremost, Turbo.264 acts as a co-processor for your Mac, enabling you to quickly convert video to the processor-intensive H.264 format without using your Mac’s resources. Turbo.264 also puts a new engine into your older (pre-Intel) Mac by dramatically accelerating the encoding process.

Turbo.264 comes with an easy “drag and drop” application. The application converts video that is not copy-protected one at a time or in a batch, and drops the converted file(s) into iTunes®, where they automatically synch with a connected iPod, Apple TV or iPhone. The Turbo.264 application also encodes video to a YouTube®-friendly format and uploads it to your YouTube account.

Turbo.264 supports DVD chapter markers, and enables you to pick from multiple audio tracks. It can also preserve Dolby Digital™ audio when encoding to Apple TV format so you can play back video on your Apple TV with your multi-channel audio sound system. Turbo.264 supports the transcoding of entire transport streams, for example from set top boxes, and automatically detects widescreen DVD content to encode it without black bars.

EyeTV software and Turbo.264 work together seamlessly, and this powerful duo is highly recommended for anyone who uses EyeTV’s Wi-Fi Access feature. Continue to watch and record live television while Turbo.264 does the heavy work of preparing recordings for Wi-Fi Access in the background.

Finally, Turbo.264 speeds up the H.264 (MPEG-4) export from many popular Macintosh video applications. Turbo.264 supports hardware acceleration in QuickTime Broadcaster™ for real-time encoding.

Under the Hood

The software application that comes with Elgato Turbo.264 offers an easy-to-use choice of presets for the iPod, Sony PSP, Apple TV, and iPhone. For Apple TV content, the quality of videos encoded with Turbo.264 software is unrivaled: Turbo.264 converts standard definition television recordings without scaling so that recordings appear on Apple TV in the same resolution they were recorded.

Experienced video enthusiasts can adjust size, aspect ratio, overscan, frame rate, data rate, and AAC audio by creating custom settings. This enables you to:

  • convert widescreen DVD video files without black bars.
  • tweak video resolution and frame rate;
  • adjust the video settings so it plays on your smartphone;
  • pick the audio track you wish to go with the main feature when converting VIDEO_TS folders.


Turbo.264 supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios as well as widescreen content.

 


The Need for Speed

Videos can take a surprisingly long time to encode to the H.264 format – sometimes longer than the actual playing time. What’s more, H.264 video encoding can demand a sizeable chunk of system resources. How long and how much depends on:

  • the processor speed of your Mac
  • the length and complexity of the source video
  • the size of the video file
  • the amount of video compression required for the desired end result


Turbo.264 accelerates video encoding up to four times faster on Macs with Intel Core processors. On an older Mac like a PowerPC G4 or PowerPC G5, the acceleration is exponentially faster - some users report up to 10 and 15 times faster.

About H.264

H.264 is the video compression standard used by the iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, Sony PSP, and EyeTV's Wi-Fi Access feature. It offers extremely high quality video in small file sizes.