We just snagged ourselves a new piece of hardware known as the Elgato Turbo.264. It is a USB h.264 hardware encoder, allowing compression offloading to this device instead of your computer. We have been testing it out for the day re-compressing a number of our own videos and looking through the pros and cons. This is that we have come up with.

The Elgato Turbo is a very small USB stick, much like a jump drive. Usage couldn’t be much simpler as you plug it in and fire up the software. Though right now there is an updated version so you will want to download that from the Elgato site.

Inside the software you will find a pretty intuitive interface .Drag and drop a video file into the program, then select a format from the dropdown list of predefined formats. If you need more control choose the “edit” option from the drop and and start to go through the various controls. The first apparent downside is the resolution limitation. The Elgato can max at 800×600 in the Apple TV preset, Followed by 640×480 in the iPod high setting. This really isn’t much of a limitation as it is designed to deliver to the web, and mobile devices. Most of which cant handle much more then that anyways. Though the Apple TV is the exception with being able to push HD720 out, so you will not be able to do that with the Elgato.

Our main purpose for buying this (it only costs $99.95), was to speed up our “to web” workflow. We use the web to post all reviews for our clients. Compression times in compressor can get very long, and then eat up your computer time as it works away. The Elgato solves both problems by offloading the compression work and its speeds were more then impressive.

Our First Test
Our Normal work-flow is to into Compressor and output. We used a resolution of 600×337 and the 800kbs h.264 setting. Our original file size was 1.2Gb for a 3 minute file, and the audio was set to 32k at 96kbps. This resulted in a file size 26megs, and took about 32 minutes to process.

Running this same video through the Elgato finished in 3 minutes and created a file size of 26megs. We also noticed a significant processor usage hit when using compressor, and as expected the elgato did not hit the computer for much at all.

We were happy with the results, with a fraction of the time and CPU usage the Elgato really was nothing. Obviously the big difference is the brightness. The Elagto has a much darker more contrasted look, and compressor maintains a lot of the original footage. This obviously could be a deal breaker depending on what your video is for. When you need to get videos compressed faster, and your not as concerned with the darkening aspect the Elgato is an obvious choice with almost 1/10th of the time needed to compress.

To sum it all up if you looking for a utility to help speed up your compression process, we highly recommend the elgato.  Certainly does make life alot easier for moving to mobile devices and the web. The big limitation’s will be the resolution and image darkening. It also has some quirks about what you are and are not allowed to type into the custom fields. For example certain resolutions will not be allowed, and there is not a very good explanation of why. This is solved by trial and error, and once you have the output setting you need it will save them for you. One thing to note about this is settings are saved on the local machine that has the elgato plugged into it, they do not move with the device. Which is a negative point also. In the end though the elgato is definetly a tool worth having in your pocket for the price point.

Tutorial: Elgato Tutorial