Elgato Turbo.264 vs Handbrake

[Lew Zealand]

I rip everything from the DVDs beforehand to the HD and then queue everything up in HB and let 'er rip. You can do both at once, rip your DVDs while HB encodes an already ripped one.

HB will take all the CPU resources your Mac has available so if you want to do something else on your Mac, either deal with HB competing for your CPU or just pause HB for processor intensive stuff and resume when you're done.

I don't see how someone could expect a program which makes billions (trillions?) of calculations over the course of many hours not to slow down the computer. How could it not slow it down?

[deckeda]

guitarist wrote:
However, I've noticed that the Turbo produces an annoyingly high rate of sound-sync errors. I've transferred hundreds of movies and TV shows, many of them in bulk, and find that with the Turbo-processed videos, I've had to go back and redo about dozens of them in Handbrake, because the Turbo didn't accurately sync the picture and sound. The result is unwatchable. Very frustrating. I want ElGato to address this.

AFAIK elgato can't address this, because it's using the Quicktime API to do the hard work behind the scenes.

However, to verify that assertion I just made, do the transcode instead with Quicktime alone, no Turbo used.

[space-time]

deckeda wrote:
[quote=guitarist]
However, I've noticed that the Turbo produces an annoyingly high rate of sound-sync errors. I've transferred hundreds of movies and TV shows, many of them in bulk, and find that with the Turbo-processed videos, I've had to go back and redo about dozens of them in Handbrake, because the Turbo didn't accurately sync the picture and sound. The result is unwatchable. Very frustrating. I want ElGato to address this.

AFAIK elgato can't address this, because it's using the Quicktime API to do the hard work behind the scenes.

However, to verify that assertion I just made, do the transcode instead with Quicktime alone, no Turbo used.
if Elgato is using the Quicktime API, why is it so much faster than handbrake?

[guitarist]

space-time wrote:
[quote=deckeda]
[quote=guitarist]
However, I've noticed that the Turbo produces an annoyingly high rate of sound-sync errors. I've transferred hundreds of movies and TV shows, many of them in bulk, and find that with the Turbo-processed videos, I've had to go back and redo about dozens of them in Handbrake, because the Turbo didn't accurately sync the picture and sound. The result is unwatchable. Very frustrating. I want ElGato to address this.

AFAIK elgato can't address this, because it's using the Quicktime API to do the hard work behind the scenes.

However, to verify that assertion I just made, do the transcode instead with Quicktime alone, no Turbo used.
if Elgato is using the Quicktime API, why is it so much faster than handbrake?
A. First of all, it's not that much faster. I've used both extensively, and don't find that much difference.
B. ElGato isn't just using the "Quicktime API". The Elgato Turbo.264 is not just a software product, it's a hardware product, with a built-in processor.

Re: transcode errors. Whether it's an ElGato software problem, an ElGato hardware problem, or a deeper Quicktime problem, or an underlying OS problem (or a problem with my iMac) is unclear. The issue remains, using ElGato's software/hardware to transcode a batch of movies or TV shows, I got an unacceptably high number of audio sync errors. Using Handbrake, on the same batch of movies and TV shows, there were no audio sync errors.

However, my example may be tainted, because of my particular set of computers. The iMac I use for movie processing has a persistent problem I've traced to the graphics card, which may need to be replaced. Meanwhile, my MacBook Pro (the one I use for Handbrake) has no known hardware problems. My example should be taken as subjective, not representative.

Which raises a question: do applications like Quicktime and/or Handbrake use the video's processor power card to assist in transcoding? It would be helpful to know that.

I suspect it might. I seem to recall reading that in newer versions of OSX, the graphics card is engaged to do some of the processing work, or this may have been true even in earlier versions of iMacs and OSX.