Mac Pro & Turbo 264

[Mattww]

I have a Power Mac G5 at present I'm sure the Elgato Turbo 264 would be a great help exporting from Eye TV on this machine as it generally takes hours and I can't really do much else when encoding. The Turbo 264 seems to also now allow preserving DD surround as well which is great. The thing is I'm hoping to move to a Mac Pro in early 2009 and I assumed that the Mac Pro would be as faster or faster at encoding then the Turbo 264 and would still be usable for other tasks like say playing a game (that uses 1 or 2 cores) at the same time.

Is there anyone using a Turbo 264 with a Mac Pro and finding it worthwhile?

 

[Spikeanator6982]

The Turbo 264 is a hardware encoder to export your eyetv recordings right?

Well I don't have one, but I do use eyetv a lot. Exporting using the highest "ipod" setting built into eyetv the encodes use ~325% cpu out of my 8 cores. They export faster then real time, not sure about the real times, bc I havent ever timed it and remembered, I just know it doesnt take 2 hours to export a 2 hour movie.

So, Idk how fast the turbo is, but i have heard it lacks a bit in quality of the video. And obviously the 8 core MP would be much faster encoding if it could use more cores. But I am very happy with my recordings and their quality. and I don't know how a little usb stick thing, thats all it is right?, could be faster then an 4 or 8 core MP or 16 core by 2009.

 

[Mattww]

Well I don't have one, but I do use eyetv a lot. Exporting using the highest "ipod" setting built into eyetv the encodes use ~325% cpu out of my 8 cores. They export faster then real time, not sure about the real times, bc I havent ever timed it and remembered, I just know it doesnt take 2 hours to export a 2 hour movie.

Less than real time and less than half your processing resources used sounds great! I tend to use the Apple TV preset in Eye TV to add stuff to iTunes but on my dual G5 it is more like at least twice real time and 180% CPU which rules out anything except web browsing or watching a DVD - no games

 

[Spikeanator6982]

I'll run one one the Apple Tv setting and let you know.

 

[Spikeanator6982]

ok, just exported from eyetv a 2:15 long movie. It used 290-360% cpu and finished in 1 hour 3 min.

 

[Mattww]

ok, just exported from eyetv a 2:15 long movie. It used 290-360% cpu and finished in 1 hour 3 min.

Thanks for the info. It looks like a Turbo 264 wouldn't be much use on a Mac Pro. Now I have to decide if I can put up with slow encoding for the next 6 or 7 months putting the funds toward my next Mac or I could buy one and sell it on later.....

 

[SpaceMagic]

I don't know about the Mac Pro, I don't have one. I use a Turbo.264 on my 2Ghz MacBook at it really helps a lot. It encodes from avi's to mp4s at around 38 fps. Considering the video is originally 24fps in real time, this is a good result.

I bought it to convert all the avi's/movs/xyzs I made with handbrake over the many years. I'm very very pleased with it and can't really see and degradation in quality, but then, i'm no video expert.

All I need now is an Apple TV

 

[almostinsane]

I dont think that will help at all in a Mac Pro.