Filed under: Hardware, iPod Family, Peripherals, Video, Apple TV
Elgato announces turbo.264, USB stick H.264 encoder
According to the folks over at iPhone-Scene, Elgato, makers of Mac based TV tuners and the EyeTV PVR software, has announced the turbo.264 USB H.264 hardware encoder. When plugged into a Mac, this device will allow any application that uses QuickTime to export H.264 video two to four times faster than before. Of course, H.264 is the video codec favored by Apple for the iPod, the Apple TV, the forthcoming iPhone, as well as Sony's PSP and other video playing devices.Apparently, Elgato "hopes to release the stick at the end of April 2007 for 99 Euros" (~$132). Unfortunately, there is no mention of this product yet on Elgato's main site, but a few more detail are available at iPhone-Scene.
[via Digg]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scott McNulty said 7:37PM on 4-02-2007
I am sooo getting one of these!
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andy said 7:48AM on 4-03-2007
thats pretty cool, does handbrake use quicktime?
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Kenny Ye said 9:12PM on 4-02-2007
Interesting product with reasonable price.
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KiltBear said 10:03PM on 4-02-2007
HA, trying to run H.264 video on my old 12" iBook was the final straw that got me to give up on that puppy. Oh, yeah, and the fact that it was a G3... have a Black MB Core 1 Duo now.
I can see hanging this off my G5 iMac to allow that to do encoding at a reasonable rate.
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tckob said 10:33PM on 4-02-2007
hmmm....so does this shine any light on the apple rumor that all macs would get H.264 hardware encoders/decoders???
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Mark Studdock said 1:06AM on 4-03-2007
that's neat - i'd prefer it built in though... plus I want to spend money on other elgato products... but I shouldn't
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Thomas Bonk said 12:36PM on 4-03-2007
I read about this thing last week on a German Apple related news seite (http://www.macnews.de/news/98679.html). IMHO this is a hoax...
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Antony Shen said 12:52PM on 4-03-2007
I agree with Thomas Bonk, it seems like a hoax to me.
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Gordy said 1:39PM on 4-03-2007
Not a hoax. ADS has a similar product.
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EWI said 3:36PM on 4-03-2007
It is _not_ a hoax: http://blogs.sun.com/seapegasus/entry/turbo_quicktime_encoding
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JeffDM said 4:08PM on 4-03-2007
Unfortunately, for the most part, this product is there to make up for the fact that AppleTV is too limited in CODEC choices. I can see it being nice for the video editing people though, it's probably a lot more efficient use of their computer to off-load it.
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Dennis said 4:53PM on 4-03-2007
Um, #11. If the content is starting on your machine, how is this not of benefit to anyone with an iPod, iPhone, PSP, AppleTV, and any PMP that has the juice to play H.264? Unless you're sour because you have DOWNLOADED everything in XviD and aren't willing to open up your AppleTV to add Perian.
It would be awesome if the encoding process could be scaled, four sticks through a USB 2.0 hub for queuing up a list of jobs. Certainly would make one of my work tasks muuuuch easier.
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