Month: May 2009

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Elgato Video Capture

Having just purchased the turbo.264 HD from Elgato, checking their website I was interested to see a new product, called Video Capture.

Elgato Video Capture

Transfer video to your Mac from a VCR, DVR, camcorder, or any other analog video device as an iTunes-ready H.264 or MPEG-4 file. Elgato Video Capture’s easy-to-use software assists you through every step, from connecting an analog video source to recording the video on your Mac and choosing how you will watch and share it.

There is no easier way to transfer home video to your Mac to play in QuickTime, to sync with an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, to edit in iMovie, or to upload to YouTube.

I have been looking for something like this from Elgato for some time. I have a couple of Pinnacle devices for capturing video, however either they capture without a preview which is fine for most things, but not all. Or it is Windows only and this means adding extra conversion time to use the captured footage with iMovie or similar.

I use to be able to do it with my original EyeTV device, however that did not capture at a sufficient quality, but this was a fair few years ago now.

So I am going to get myself one.

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turbo.264 HD

I am a great fan of Elgato’s EyeTV and have been thinking for some time about buying their turbo.264 USB device to speed up the conversion and encoding of my recordings for use on the iPod touch or iPhone.

As I was near an Apple Store today I decided to pop in and see if they had one. Thought I found it and checked the price, wow, £139.95.

I know that buying retail can sometimes be a little more expensive, but the price seemed ridiculous, I had expected it to be around to £80-£100 mark.

Well, at least with the Apple Store with all their computers and free wifi I thought I would just recheck the Elgato website, and there on their website was the device for £139.95.

At this point I noticed the name, the turbo.264 HD read a little more and realised that this was not the turb0.264 I thought it was, but a new product, one which would also do HD. Released back in March I had missed the release.

turbo.264 HD

Are you frustrated by the amount of time it takes to get the video out of your new HD camcorder and into a watchable format?

Do you want to watch your videos and EyeTV recordings on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV?

Do you wish it didn’t take so long for your EyeTV recordings to be ready for Wi-Fi Access?

Want to put your videos on YouTube and take advantage of their new HD features?

Do you own a Sony PSP® and need a way to export videos to it?

Are you a video professional and need an efficient and inexpensive way to compress your video for streaming or the web?

Yes?

Turbo.264 HD is right for you.

As well as speeding up my EyeTV recording conversions I can also use it for other video conversion. Shall be interesting to see how much faster it does work.

Initial tests seem to show that it does work faster.

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So I need a fast graphics card to burn a DVD?

So there I was messing about with Windows 7 when I thought I would give the DVD burning a go. In the past on Windows PCs I have relied on third party applications such as Nero. Even on the Mac I don’t use the in-built burning tools and use Toast.

So I started DVD Maker and got the following error?

So I need a fast graphics card to burn a DVD?

Hmmm.

Not quite sure why I need a fast graphics card to burn a DVD.

I can imagine if the drive was too slow (or I had the wrong kind of disc) or my hard drive was not fast enough, however a graphics card which was too slow…

Why?

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Can’t connect, won’t connect

Good article from Bill Thompson on wireless issues.

The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, must be hoping that his neighbours don’t decide to have a larger family.

He recently spent ages setting up a high-speed wireless network (wi-fi) at home, documenting the whole tortuous process on the BBC Technology blog, but all his hard work could apparently be ruined by a single baby listener.

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Windows 7

I have been running Windows 7 (build 7000) on my HP 2133 for a few weeks now and it has been running very smoothly with very few issues.

I ought to really get a 6 cell battery for the 2133 as the 3 cell battery is really insufficient for most needs, okay for around the house, but rubbish for taking the 2133 out for the day.

At least the camera works, which it didn’t in Suse, and it remembers my wireless network too.