Macs will eventually get H.264 (AVC) hardware acceleration
for both decoding and encoding. In fact, ATI X1600 Mobility can handle that
already via AVIVO. Before Jobs gives the greenlight, someone has ought to come
up with a solution to help out the folks with low-end Macs to speed up their DVD ripping process to AVC format.
Enter the Elgato Turbo 264. The USB dongle with a curiously spelled name does the exact same job as the ADS Instant Video To Go USB encoder except the Elgato bundles their in-house converter whereas ADS licenses the software from ArcSoft. If Video To Go is any indication, the Elgato should improve encoding speed by 2 to 4 times. Practically speaking, I do think people still need this despite of the presence of duo core in iMacs and MacBooks, because converting stuff into H.264 at 640×480 is still painfully slow even with these new advanced processors. A co-processor especially designed for the task couldn’t be more welcome.
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