Just My Two Cents » video http://www.jeffself.net Miscellaneous Ramblings of an Apple, Linux, Photography and sports geek Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:45:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 2008 Recap http://www.jeffself.net/2009/01/08/2008-recap/ http://www.jeffself.net/2009/01/08/2008-recap/#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:10:03 +0000 jeff http://www.jeffself.net/blog/?p=65 Another year gone by.  Good riddance, 2008.  I lost my grandmother and father within a week of each other in October.  When all the older members of your family are gone, you get a new perspective on life.  I don’t have parents to lean on for advice anymore.

With the losses in my family the last few years, I am now on a mission to preserve as much history as possible.  I am scanning negatives and photos and storing them in Aperture.  I have a box full of 8mm film that I need to have converted.  I’ve got a ton of geneology stuff that my mom had.  I also have Digital 8 tapes of my own kids that I am converting to MPEG4 movies.  I’m worried that my Sony Digital 8 camera is going to fail before I can get all these tapes migrated.

So this is my mission for 2009.  How am I going to accomplish all this?  I’ll blog about this in the future.

]]> http://www.jeffself.net/2009/01/08/2008-recap/feed/ 0 The Elgato Turbo.264 rocks! http://www.jeffself.net/2007/08/08/the-elgato-turbo264-rocks/ http://www.jeffself.net/2007/08/08/the-elgato-turbo264-rocks/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:42:28 +0000 jeff http://www.jeffself.net/blog/2007/08/08/the-elgato-turbo264-rocks/ One of my hobbies is converting Virginia Tech football games from video to digital. I’m using Final Cut Studio to do the job. I export my video’s to MPEG-4 H.264 640×480 resolution at 2500 kbits/s and 128kbps AAC audio. Normally, I export only one half of a football game at a time and let it do the encoding while I’m sleeping. A 30 – 40 minute video will take about 3 to 4 hours on my Power Mac Dual G5 2.0ghz machine.

I had been reading about the Elgato Turbo.264 device which offloads the encoding from the computers CPU to the Turbo.264 Video Encoder Hardware. It looks like a thumb drive and plugs into a USB 2.0 port. Well, I ordered it and received it today.

I did a test to see how it performed. I took a video clip of a Virginia Tech game that was 2 minutes 6 seconds and exported it to Apple TV format. This translates to a 720×480 video at 2500 kbits/s data rate. It took about 9 minutes. Then I plugged in the Elgato Turbo.264 thingamajiggy and had the clip export to the Apple TV (Elgato Turbo) setting. It was done in less than 3 minutes! Amazing! So how’s the quality? Looking at the two video’s side by side, the Turbo.264 encoded video looks far better.

For my final test, I copied the video to my Mac mini which is running Ubuntu 7.04. I brought up VLC and the video looks great on Ubuntu as well.

I highly recommend it. And you too can save $2500 like I did. The Mac Pro is $2499. The Elgato Turbo.264 is far less at Amazon.

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