I recieved my Elgato Trubo.264 at about 3:00 PM PST today. I don’t have any video of my golf swing yet so I won’t be testing that conversion yet. I decided to instead convert my favorite movie, The Princess Bride, so that I could watch it on my iPod. For the record, yes I have a legally purchased copy of The Princess Bride. I do not encourage anyone to use these techniques for anything of questionable legality. Now that we have that out of the way, lets get to talking about the conversion.
It turns out that Elgato doesn’t provide the ability to read encrypted DVDs with their software. Yes it’s a set back but fortunately there is some open source software that comes to the rescue. The VLC media player can play encrypted DVDs. It’s available on a variety of platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux to name a few. A utility called FairMount by Metakine uses the VLC Media player to assist in backing DVDs. You need to install the VLC media player before using FairMount. It’s annoying that we have to take these extra steps, but hey, what can we really do about it. The MPAA would come down hard on Elgato if they included DVD decryption in their software.
The conversion process is really easy.
- Plug in the Turbo.264
- Open FairMount application
- Open the Turbo.264 application
- In the Turbo.264 application add the DVD files to the queue using the plus button on the lower left hand corner of the window.
- Click the Start button.
It’s that simple. It may seem like FairMount isn’t being used because you load the files from the DVD, but that is part of the magic of how it works.
The Princess Bride being transcoded by the Elgato Turbo.264 software.
It does appear to transcode the video significantly faster than it would using an application like Handbrake, but personally I believe that if Handbrake could use the Turbo.264 it would be even faster than the Elgato software. The Elgato software uses quicktime to encode the h.264 video, Handbrake doesn’t, and it’s actually faster. Many people have demonstrated that, so I don’t feel the need to.
I wish there was an option to watch the video as it is being encoded. Using a different technique for decrypting the DVD would allow this. So Instead I decided to encode it in the AppleTV format first. Then I can encode it for my iPod after that. I’m definitely glad I purchased the Turbo.264. I can’t wait to test it on some video shot from our camera.
T-Mobile G1 Update RC33
I recieved a notification that a new update was available for my cell phone, the T-Mobile G1. The update took a while to install. It had to restart during the update which was strange, since the last few updates only restarted before and after the update, never in the middle. So what did it add? The app store will now tell you if an update is available. That is the only thing I’ve noticed so far. I’m assuming it was mostly bug fixes.
One thing that still hasn’t been fixed is the use of the special recent mode for pop accounts that are hosted by gmail. It’s silly too, it’s clearly an oversight in the email application because it only needs to have “recent:” appended to the username during the authentication stage. I’m guessing it’s the semi-colon that is tripping the email application up since a semi-colon isn’t used in email addresses. If I really had to guess as to the implementation specifics, I’m thinking it might just be stripping the semi-colon from the email address and trying to authenticate with just “recent” prepended. That would be a really easy mistake to make and to overlook. Oh well maybe in a future release this will be fixed. And yes I have brought it to T-Mobiles attention.