The DHL courier arrived unexpected, carrying a mysterious parcel. Inside a small box containing the new Miglia VideoExpress, a short USB extension lead, CD and small booklet. All for me to play with.

Miglia’s VideoExpress is a hardware-based converter designed to turn unprotected DVDs, QuickTime and mpeg files into the h.264 format used by AppleTV, some iPods and the iPhone.
Literally ripping the tiny device from its backing sheet – Miglia’s glue is very strong - plugging it into a USB2 slot of a G4 or better and bunging in the CD produces a ‘contact us’ document, a short PDF instruction guide and clickable link to download the VideoExpress software.
The software expands to a small ‘dumb’ application with no preferences to set other than the save location and output format. These are: Sony PSP, iPod and AppleTV with different degrees of quality. Plus full-size NTSC and PAL and a web video option. VideoExpress can convert from: DV, mpeg2, DivX, VOB, MP4, MPEG2 TS or PS (Transport or Program stream). It can also convert EyeTV’s native recordings by using the .mpg file within the package EyeTV records to, inside its archive. This is selected by Control-clicking to ’show package contents’.
All it takes is dragging and dropping a movie to be converted, selecting the setting to use, where to save it and clicking the start button. Once running, only a standard progress ribbon shows anything is happening. I ran with Activity Monitor open to check on CPU usage, which is low on my G5 2×2GHz. According to Miglia, the Mac’s processor/s are used to decompress the original file so there are slight variations in conversion times depending on the speed of the processor. This is more than made up for by the rate of video conversion which is done entirely by VideoExpress itself.

Comparing VideoExpress with ElGato’s Turbo.264
These two devices are almost identical in price, size, shape and what they set out to achieve. They both work with any QuickTime enabled program and are much faster than current Macs at compressing and converting video.
They were both used to convert the same .avi movie and conversion times were similar with VideoExpress taking 93 minutes compared with Turbo.264’s 81 minutes.
Better quality output from VideoExpress
VideoExpress produced a 1.17GB file compared with Turbo.264’s 1.15GB but the quality of the two resulting movies was different. VideoExpress produced a much brighter result than Turbo.264, something I noted when I tested it here.

Next, both devices were connected to a MacBook Core2Duo 2Ghz laptop at the same time and a copy of the same 31MB QuickTime movie was converted by each simultaneously, both set to output iPod highest (640×480). VideoExpress complete the task in 5 minutes creating a 51.4MB file compared with the faster (4 minutes), smaller (42.2MB) but darker Turbo.264.

Software
Using the programs for both devices is very easy with a little more information and tweaking on hand from Turbo.264. Surprisingly, neither device can work with their creator company’s own native files. VideoExpress cannot convert ‘The Tube’ format recordings made by several of Miglia’s TV tuners and Turbo.264 cannot use EyeTV recordings made by ElGato’s TV tuners except from within the EyeTV software itself. I did not have any ‘The Tube’ recordings to play with to see if Turbo.264 can convert them.
Miglia notes that a software update will be released to fix the ‘The Tube’ problem along with the ability to convert XviD files and an improved QuickTime Export plug-in.
VideoExpress has more output options than Turbo.264 which in turn has more user-definable conversion options. Turbo.264 shows the movie stepping through the conversion with an estimated time to completion while VideoExpress shows a simple progress bar. On the other hand, the richer graphic display of Turbo.264 takes an increased amount of Mac processing power compared with VideoExpress.
Turbo.264 can set up a list of files to work with whereas VideoExpress can only do one at a time. This might be important if you want to set up a joblist and then leave your Mac to work its way through it.
Conclusion
Both devices are excellent. Miglia’s VideoExpress is marginally easier to use than Turbo.264 by having more presets but without user-definable options. It also takes a tad longer to produce better and slightly larger files than ElGato’s Turbo.264. If I were an AppleTV, iPod or iPhone user and wanted a hardware-based video converter I’d be hard pressed to decide which to buy.