It's useful for converting VHS tapes, set-top box recordings, older camcorders and various other analog sources to H.264, which you can then transfer to iPods, iPhones and PSPs, depending on what you have. The Video Capture costs $100, but is probably worth it if you have a lot of old VHS tapes of MacGyver and Wings to transcode. [Elgato]

The Price: $129.95

The Verdict: Elgato's turbo.264HD is a great encoder for those who need to basically do a lot of video encoding and want it done quickly. It's extremely intuitive, making it quick and simple to use, and is also the fastest one we've tried to date.

Using an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which was 20.5 minutes long and a 175MB AVI file) as our guinea pig, we tested the turbo.264HD converter against older encoding programs including iSquint and the previous version of turbo.264.

Encoding times for an h.264 file

From these results, iSquint's conversion times seem to jump drastically depending on what platform it is converting for. But with turbo.264HD and it's previous version, they were both consistent in their conversions—a couple of them only differing by 3 seconds, with Elgato's upgrade being consistently faster—up to 5 times as fast as iSquint in some cases— than the others. However, one thing you have to remember with the turbo.264HD though is that you cannot use the program unless you have the USB plugged in, forcing you to use something else (iSquint) if you don't have it on you. Also, the dongle only works with its designated turbo.264HD software, rendering it useless when used with any other program and with any other application that has Quicktime export as well.

As for quality, I honestly can say that all the encoders produced pretty much the same type of video when converted for the iPod: slightly grainy and blury like a crappy, pirated video rip, but nothing to truly nitpick considering the medium it's for.

Before purchasing turbo.264HD, it would be smart to think about whether you have $130 worth of video you need encoded, or if you'd rather spend more time encoding to save some money. Basically, what is worth more to you: time or money?

The Price: $99

The Verdict: Testing on a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM, exporting a movie to iPhone using the Turbo.264 on default settings with Quicktime Pro used less than 50% CPU and took about 11 minutes, whereas exporting the same movie with the same settings without the device used 100% CPU and took 15 minutes.

To make sure it wasn't just Quicktime's export functionality determining the encode speed, we tested exporting for iPod using Elgato's default encoding app versus iSquint, which does something very similar. iSquint used a little over 50% CPU and took 8 minutes to encode a 22-minute episode of Venture Bros. into an iPod format, and Elgato's encoder (using the Turbo.264) also used a little over 50% CPU and took 5 minutes.

Elgato claims performance gains will be much more dramatic on machines with lesser processing power, so keep that in mind as you decide whether this is right for you. Even on a pretty new machine, we saw speedups of around 50%, which is pretty substantial. For us, it's definitely a good buy if you encode video for your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV frequently and want to save time (and CPU cycles) in the process. [Elgato]

Instead of using your processor to encode and decode video, this Turbo 264 offloads the job so you're free to do other things. The implications of this are recording a screencast in real time, or doing real-time transcoding of various content that you can stream to your Apple TV. Or, you can just use it (rather boringly) to make videos for your iPod and iPhone fast.

For now, it's only available in Europe for 99 Euros. – Jason Chen

Turbo 264 [Macwelt]

The Elgato Eyetv Hybrid looks like a promising spent-all-my-money-on-my-mac-can't-afford-a-tv solution. It's the latest update to the EyeTV line - a USB-powered tv tuner that supports analog antenna, digital (or HD) antenna, coax and s-video sources. There's full front-row support and the EyeTV software allows lossless recording even in HD mode (assuming you have a G5 or core-duo processor).

Sure, HDMI support would be nice, but probably impossible right now at the $149 asking price. Overall, it's a good solution for those who've evolved to not watching porn on anything but their computer screen. -Mark Wilson

Product Page [via krunker]