IT tips and tricks from the ArtsIT team, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
A quick note – the makers of Visual Hub (an amazing video conversion program) have now released an audio conversion program called AudialHub.
If their video conversion program is anything to go by, this audio conversion program will be a must get!
I’ll report back once I have had a chance to put it through its paces.
This is not going to be a long discussion on all the ins and outs, or even requirements of converting videos, but a look at 2 solutions, one hardware, one software.
I have been using a MacBook Pro to do the conversions, and to date have been using a program called Visual Hub – a really cool (Australian?) program that can convert videos from many different formats to another, including mp4, mov, avi, flv etc.
An alternative is a hardware solution, called the Elgato Turbo.264.
It is touted as being a co processor for the video conversion (and with a significant speed gain)
I have been giving the Elgato a serious workout, and am becoming increasingly impressed with the device. For some reason the first tests were underperforming, but since then, speed has increased 3 fold. As I write this, I have a conversion happening in the background, and there is still plenty of CPU spare for other tasks. The Turbo.264 and associated program are consuming around 60-70% of the CPU, and it is encoding at a cool 90 frames per second. (Update – the fastest now experienced has been 149 frames per second. I was almost expecting to smell burnt rubber!)
The software equivalent encodes around 30 – 60 FPS, and consumes every bit of resource available, and almost 100% more again. (I know that doesn’t make sense, but what does 180% of the CPU actually mean?)
If it continues to be as impressive, this will quickly become an indispensable device for anyone doing this sort of function – whether that be converting movies from DVD to watch on an iPod, preparing videos for podcasting/delivering video online etc.
The Turbo.264’s onboard processor encodes video into the H264 codec with approximately the capabilities of a 2.GHz Core 2 duo Mac. If your computer is faster than this, you may be able to encode it quicker with a software only solution (although it will consume more resources to do so). If you have a computer slower, then this will definitely give a huge boost in performance. On a PowerPC for example, the Turbo completely outstrips the CPU for performance, so will turn an otherwise slow old computer into quite a reasonable H264 encoder.
In any respect, the graphs Elgato use compare the Turbo to the encoding done with Quicktime. Based on that, I’d certainly say that Quicktime is a poor choice for H264 conversion – there are much faster software-only solutions.
At the moment, you can only use one Turbo.264 at a time- I’m hoping in the future that there will be the ability to double them up for a further performance boost.