As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this site, you don’t need a high powered machine to provide the media serving functions for your iTunes server, as most of the work performed by the server is just reading & serving files from your storage media.

 

If you are recording live TV, however, you’ll be needing to encode the MPEG2 files captured by your TV device in order for them to be imported into iTunes and played back on your media clients.  On a slower Mac this can be quite a processor intensive task - on our dual-1.25Ghz G4, for instance, encoding a 45 minute recording often took more than 12 hours.

 

Enter Elgato’s Turbo H.264, which is to the best of my understanding the only external media encoder currently available for the Mac platform.  The Turbo is a small USB device that contains a dedicated H.264 encoding chipset, designed to take the processing work off the main CPU and onto a dedicated device, in much the same way that the chips on a graphics card are dedicated to rendering images on the screen.

 

Installing the Turbo is easy - the packaging comes with the Turbo itself, a short USB extender (useful as the Turbo’s width means it might not fit if you’ve got devices plugged into adjacent USB ports), a redundant instruction manual and an installation CD.

 

Simply quit EyeTV if it’s running, plug in the Turbo into a spare USB 2 port on your media server, then copy the Turbo application from the CD onto the media server.  When you launch the application for the first time you will be prompted through a driver installation process (very simple), after which you can simply quit the application and re-launch EyeTV.

 

To confirm that the Turbo is working, simply pick a recording from your EyeTV Programs list and click the iPod or AppleTV export buttons.  Where you’d normally see the progress bar for the encoding process you will also notice 4 small pulsing circles, which indicate that the Turbo is doing the encoding work.

 

The application that ships with the Turbo allows you to drag and drop other media files across to be encoded into H.264, however in our media server implementation we don’t really need to do this, as everything we want can be done directly from EyeTV.

 

With the Turbo installed, encoding a 45 minute live TV capture now takes around 60 minutes on the same G4, which is a massive improvement, and means that shows recorded on the media server can now be watched from any of the clients within a reasonable time from the live show ending.