Video Encoders Compared

Real World Video Compression looked at four Mac compression tools: El Gato’s Turbo.264 1.3 hardware dongle and software, Apple’s Compressor 3.0.3, Episode Pro 5.0.1, and Techspansion’s Visual Hub 1.3.4 to see which performs best in terms of speed (not necessarily quality; all rendering was done with default settings).

The tests were run on a beefy Mac Pro and a slightly older MacBook Pro. The Turbo.264 fared the best thanks to its DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chip, but that was the case on both machines – indicating that you’d be just fine offloading some compression tasks to an older Mac and a Turbo.264, versus spending the money to buy a new, faster system.

(Hat tip to FreshDV.com.)

Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles. View all posts by Jeff Carlson