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Elgato Turbo.264 vs Handbrake
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04-07-2010, 05:52 AM
If I encode a lot of video on my imac (2ghz, 4gb ram) it gets slower and slower and slower until I have to reboot finally. It is also frustrating when I have a conversion running and the kids want to play their flash games under their own logins (using lots of ram and cpu). I'm wondering if the Elgato Turbo.264 would alleviate these problems for me while maintaining good quality and file size? Any users here?
04-07-2010, 05:56 AM
Wow, didn't realize how spendy it was. $94 on ebay. Same on google shopping.
04-07-2010, 06:09 AM
Are you sure it's not the flash games causing the computer to slow down. When my son plays this one flash game for a couple of hours my computer gets so slow, I have to restart.
04-07-2010, 06:42 AM
There was a thread on this about three months ago...I decided not to purchase one. And, I've found that when using Handbrake, things really slow down. Speeds up again after the Handbraking is finished.
04-07-2010, 07:42 AM
Don't make a habit of doing both at the same time. Do your Handbrake conversions at night. Queue them up and let it run.
04-07-2010, 10:15 AM
I'm going to interject a dumb question here - if using HB to record from a DVD, don't you have to be there to remove/insert DVDs as the queued process goes on, rendering the queue feature impotent?
04-07-2010, 10:22 AM
Absolutely, don't do (or don't allow other family members to do) any processor-hungry things on a mac WHILE a Handbrake conversion is running, yikes! I'm surprised this was attempted in the first place.
Handbrake requires 90+% of the mac's resources. No joke, open the activity monitor, and watch how much of the processor it uses, on my mac, it hovers around 94%. If you really need to interrupt the process, use the mac for something else, or launch another app, It's better to hit the "pause" button on Handbrake, and then let it go back to processing when the mac is unattended. Or, as suggested above, save the projects to do overnight, when there'll be no interruptions. As it happens, I have both Handbrake and the Elgato Turbo, and each has merits. With the Turbo, the demands on your mac's resources are far, far less. You can let a movie process while doing pretty much anything else you want at the same time. That's the primary benefit, it handles a lot of the processing in its own hardware. Great for multitasking. 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. In the end, I like Handbrake better. It can handle more kinds of content, produces fewer errors, is more configurable (subtitles, for example) and can work directly from a protected DVD. With Turbo, it takes an additional step beforehand, decoding and transferring the DVD, then using Turbo. Handbrake does it all in one step. The only disadvantage I'm aware of is that you need to leave your computer alone while Handbrake working, because it'll take all the juice your mac can give it. Small price to pay for top-notch conversions and highly-customizable output.
04-07-2010, 01:49 PM
olnacl wrote: I've only used the queue function when ripping from a DVD with multiple titles, such as a disc with several tv shows on it. Otherwise, for movie discs with one title, I just rip them one at a time and change discs when necessary. I've read that some folks here use Mac-The-Ripper or another utility to get the movies on their hard drive, then use Handbrake to finish them off in a queue. There's probably other ways to use the queue feature that I'm not aware of though. I'm by no means an expert on the subject, so, as usual, YMMV. |
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