Techspansion is no more

Nostalgia

Which may not mean a lot to most people, but they produced the software I blogged about on here recently called VisualHub and AudialHub.  The second I didn’t get to try out in the end, and the first is the primary solution I use for converting video files from one format to another, and in my case specifically, producing the iPod compatible mp4 files (H264 codec).

Apparently the products will still be compatible with the next Mac OS (10.6 – Snow Leopard), but with the recipient hardware changing regularly and rapidly (iPods etc), the software will become dated very quickly.

It is disappointing, and somewhat surprising that they’ve simply closed their doors and discontinued the product, rather than selling it.  Guess I will be looking for a new conversion solution in the near future.

The Turbo264 is ok, but doesn’t produce as small a file with the same quality, and more importantly, cannot handle static images (such as powerpoint slides) inside the video file – they tend to run like a watercolour painting in a rainstorm – weird, and unusable.

Converting Videos to mp4 (eg iPod) (Mac only) – updated

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).

So I put it through its paces, testing the conversion of a 500MB video file to mp4 format, H264 codec. 640 x 480

Updated. I have since been giving the Elgato a serious workout, and am becoming increasingly impressed with the device. For some reason the first test 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 2 – 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.

The Elgato took 12 minutes, and consumed 60% of the CPU for the operation

Visual Hub took 13 minutes, and consumed 180% of the CPU (in a faster computer, or rather one with a quad core, the ability of Visual Hub to push the computer to its limit would give it a significant speed gain over the Turbo.264

I must admit, I was very surprised. Given that they are claiming such significant speed gains, the result here don’t substantiate the claims. This is using the latest program they supply, running on a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. That makes it reasonably spec’ed but certainly not a front runner as far as overall computer powerhouses.

Granted, having the CPU freed up is an advantage, but I’d much rather see a significant speed gain in converting the files, than just having the computer itself having to work a little easier in doing so.

Update: I have been using the Turbo over the weekend, and have found it to be pretty good. The speed has increased a bit – encodes around 60 frames per second (from DVD) which isn’t too bad, and the CPU is still relatively free for me to use the computer for other tasks.