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MKV to AppleTV with Elgato Turbo .264 HD

D

donster28

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 5, 2006
1,726
811
Great White North
Hello everyone.

I'm just curious if anyone here tried the Elgato Turbo .264 HD route when converting their MKV files to AppleTV 720p, AC3.

I know about the quality issues this was having when it first launched and there have been fixes lately including support for MKV so I'm wondering how it fares compared to Handbrake.

Does it really cut down on encoding time? If it does, it'll greatly relieve my MBP 13" cpu. It currently takes 4-6 hours encoding to mp4 with Handbrake.

Just a side note: My MKV files are derived from my Blu-ray and HD-DVD rips.

Any impression is appreciated. Thanks.
 
I'm using it and am quite happy with the results. The conversions are about 4x the speed of HandBrake, but are less optimized than a HandBrake encode. This results in encodes that have both a higher average and a lower peak bitrate than HandBrake.
 
bohbot16 said:
I'm using it and am quite happy with the results. The conversions are about 4x the speed of HandBrake, but are less optimized than a HandBrake encode. This results in encodes that have both a higher average and a lower peak bitrate than HandBrake.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the response. Are your outputs 720p with AC3? Do they have any artifacting, noise, etc?
 
Yes, the files are 720p h.264 in an m4v container with AAC stereo + AC3 5.1 audio. There are some compression artifacts, but I had to look for them to see them.
 
bohbot16 said:
I'm using it and am quite happy with the results. The conversions are about 4x the speed of HandBrake, but are less optimized than a HandBrake encode. This results in encodes that have both a higher average and a lower peak bitrate than HandBrake.
Click to expand...
I just got my Turbo.264 HD today and after testing a few files (all 720p MKVs) I have to say I'm pretty impressed. Handbrake transcodes @ CAF 60% usually take about 4-5 hours on my iMac (mid-2007, 2.8GHz C2E, 4GB RAM) but with the Turbo.264 HD conversion is down to about 60-90 minutes - usually 35-45 FPS or so. CPU load is around 50-60% so it's not heating up as much (always a plus) and I'm able to multi-task with a less noticeable performance hit. Overall, not too bad at all.
 
Large file sizes

ElGato Turbo.264HD is definitely faster than Handbrake but the resulting file sizes are much bigger than those created with Handbrake - often 100% larger but more often at least 50% larger.

I was having issues with the ElGato software (it wouldn't break up the tv episodes into separate parts on TV Show rips and encodes are darker than Handbrake's). In a testing frenzy several years ago I bought Metakine's DVD Remaster Pro 5.0 and discovered that version 6.0 introduced support for ElGato's Turbo.264 HD. It successfully broke TV Show DVD rips into parts corresponding to the episodes so I gave up on the ElGato software.

However, I haven't been able to find a way to adjust the size of the encodes created by the ElGato Turbo.264 HD - whether I'm using ElGato's own software OR Metakine's. I've updated each to the most recent versions (Turbo.264 HD: 1.1.4, DVD Remaster Pro: 7.01) but still no luck.

Metakine's states clearly that the file-size and brightness are due to ElGato's firmware/software so there's nothing they can do.

Hard drive space is very cheap but not so cheap that I use the Turbo.264 HD instead of Handbrake - especially given Handbrake's brighter encodes. My iTunes Library already requires a 2TB external drive - with only about 700 GB of free space; I'm forecasting having to upgrade to a 3 TB drive in the next 12 months at the latest.

-Peter
 
Depending on your mkv file, you might not have to convert it at all.

Just remux the file with Subler or MKVtools, mkv=>m4v(mp4) without converting the video. It takes 5 minutes rather than hours.
 
spacepower7 said:
Depending on your mkv file, you might not have to convert it at all.

Just remux the file with Subler or MKVtools, mkv=>m4v(mp4) without converting the video. It takes 5 minutes rather than hours.
Click to expand...

+1

The origin of this post dates back to 2009, so things have evolved since then. MKVTools to remux MKV to M4V, when source contains 720p HD. In the MP4 tab, select the ATV preset, pass-thru video, ac3 audio, add 2nd 2-ch audio track, convert. Then Subler to enable all tracks, add subs, metadata, artwork, and the HD flag. About 15 mins on a 13" MBP 2.53GHz w/ 4GB RAM.
 
sampdoria said:
+1

The origin of this post dates back to 2009, so things have evolved since then. MKVTools to remux MKV to M4V, when source contains 720p HD. In the MP4 tab, select the ATV preset, pass-thru video, ac3 audio, add 2nd 2-ch audio track, convert. Then Subler to enable all tracks, add subs, metadata, artwork, and the HD flag. About 15 mins on a 13" MBP 2.53GHz w/ 4GB RAM.
Click to expand...

thanks.. i ahve sever old dvds ripped from my windows pc which were ripped to mkv (stupid i know) so handbrake was driving me a lil crazy!

thanks
 
sampdoria said:
+1

The origin of this post dates back to 2009, so things have evolved since then. MKVTools to remux MKV to M4V, when source contains 720p HD. In the MP4 tab, select the ATV preset, pass-thru video, ac3 audio, add 2nd 2-ch audio track, convert. Then Subler to enable all tracks, add subs, metadata, artwork, and the HD flag. About 15 mins on a 13" MBP 2.53GHz w/ 4GB RAM.
Click to expand...

I have to add that MKVTools is EPIC. It converted a 4 GB 720 AVI file (a uhm home movie) to AppleTV format in about 5 minutes. This took 10 hours with Handbrake.
 
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