Digital Home Thoughts: Encoding in the Fast Lane: The El Gato Turbo.264 Reviewed

What is the Turbo.264?
To put it simply, the Turbo.264 is an H.264 encoder that's slightly bigger than a standard thumb drive. It plugs into any USB 2.0 port on your Mac and increases H.264 conversion speed to 5x what your Mac can normally handle.

What is H.264?
Before you can really understand what the Turbo.264 does, you have to understand what H.264 is.

H.264 is, without getting too technical, a variation on the MPEG-4 video standard. It's the format of choice for many new multimedia devices (particularly those from Apple including the AppleTV and iPod / iPhone) because it provides increased compression over other formats as well as increased video quality. I'm not such a close-looker that I can see that much of a difference, but the general consensus is that things are much improved.

Along with the increased compression and quality comes a problem, of course, and that's actually producing H.264 content. Because it compresses more at a higher quality, production is extremely CPU intensive and can bog down even fast computers. This is where the Turbo.264 comes in.

How do you use it?
If there's a simpler piece of hardware to use, I really don't know what it is. You install the software, then plug in the device. When you run the included converter, you'll see a speedometer in the upper right corner of the window which will indicate whether or not the device is functioning properly. To encode a video, simply drop it into the window.