Elgato Turbo.264

As part of my new set up I picked up an Elgato Turbo.264. It is a USB video encoder designed to convert video into H.264 format effectively as a co-processor.

The integration of the Turbo.264 into the eyeTV software was seamless (I have eyeTV 2 rather than the latest version 3). EyeTV simply carries on as normal but when you request an H.264 based conversion, as with iPod and AppleTV, it simply uses the Turbo.264 automatically. The way you know that eyeTV is using the Turbo.264 is that the encoding bar switches to red and a set of pulsing circles appears below it. The Turbo.264 also comes with it's own software application which allows drag and drop conversions - although I have yet to test this.

In general the Turbo.264 performed well with eyeTV, allowing me to continue using other applications on the Mac Mini without the dreaded beachball turning up; however, it subbornly refused to correctly convert some eyeTV recordings. Two in particular it simply wouldn't convert more than the first couple of minutes, in one case it dropped out giving a rather unhelpful error message and in the other it just posted a file into iTunes that was only 5 1/2 minutes long. I've no idea why this is occurring on only these two files as the other 6 I have tried (of various lengths) have converted correctly. I plan to reset the whole machine and see if this behaviour continues.