Perian and Elgato Turbo 264 are hopelessly slow

[8767092]

I am currently processing some MKV files with Submerge using Perian and the Turbo 264.

VisualHub will process these files without proper subtitles at roughly 23fps using just ffmpeg.

Submerge using Quicktime decoding with the Turbo 264 dedicated hardware encoder is getting just 5fps. (Note: 3 - 5fps is the speed without the Turbo 264 too. The system CPU just bogs down completely.)

Mac Mini 1.83 GHz, 4GB ram running 10.5.5.

Is there anything I can do to speed this up?

Perian 1.1.1, Turbo 264 software 1.3, Submerge 1.5.5 and the latest Quicktime Pro are all installed.

 

[mpshay]

Get a new computer

Mac minis certainly do a lot of things well, but fast video encoding is not one of them

 

[mgpg89]

No, this is definitely NOT a reason to buy a new computer, as your CPU and GPU aren't even used for the process, the external Turbo.264 is though.

I've experienced similar problems using the Turbo.264 encoder and contacted Elgato customer support about it.
This was their answer:

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with your Turbo.264 encodes.

Matroska videos create strange problems when being converted from. Part of the issue is that the Matroska format has new features that may not be fully supported in other movie types. This causes strange things to happen when encoding from a matroska source.

For now, encoding a mkv file through Turbo ends up with ridiculously long encode times. This is probably related to how matroska's plugin support works in QuickTime, but for now, we know that it doesn't work well.

Leo Park
Customer Support


So yeah, nothing you can do about it for now, not as long as Elgato doesn't fully support MKV file formats in their products.

However, this is what I do instead now:
Buy QuickTime Pro.
Put the movie (mkv) and subtitle file (same name except for the extension) in the same folder and play the movie using QuickTime Pro.
Then choose 'Save as...' and choose the upper option, causing the subtitles to be hard-coded into the movie file.

That way, you'll end up with a full quality, subtitled movie, which you can import in iTunes or watch in QuickTime without any problems.

Hope this helped you out.