I’m a fan of video. Though I don’t remember when I last watched conventional TV, turning the box on to see what was there, I do definitely enjoy watching series, preferably three or more episodes in a row.

My favourite genre has got to be goofy, slice-of-life, fan-sub anime.

It’s bubble gum. It’s pop corn. It’s candy floss. And there are so danged many ways of finding it I’m not going to waste blog space telling you how to.

But say you did have 12 episodes of “High School Girls” or 13 episodes of “Boys Be”. How are you going to watch them?

You might watch them on your expensive home entertainment system, but I ain’t got one and even if I did I don’t have the time (or alibi) to sit in front of one watching this sort of stuff.

So, I watch it on my iPhone. The screen’s really good, the storage isn’t bad and if i’m early for an appointment, or have a bit of a break, I can watch half an episode or so without spouse or kids asking, “What the heck is that?”

Now, you average downloaded episode is about 150MB say, but is invariably in some sort of DIVX avi format, that is to say one step away from the iPhone. There are a number of queued ile translators, but none so far, in my experience beats elgato’s turbo.264 for speed and ease of use. I can clock conversions at ca 47 fps while working on other things on the same computer, all thanks to the turbo.264’s built in converter thingy. It’s a USB plug that does the grunt work of the conversion, leaving your processor for you to do other things with. That’s it in brief.

This is more of a recommendation than a review. If you are in the habit of needing to convert video files to AppleTV, Video iPod or iPhone formats, take a serious look at this. It gets a “it just works” award. I’ve been using it for months, and i’m still impressed.

A hint, too. If you want to get subtitles on your iPhone, chosing 352x240 pixels screen size for your conversion seems to work best. otherwise, I found I was clipping the bottom off. Bakka!