[geeks] ~RE: Mac World announcements...

[nate at portents.com]

Regarding video conversion, specifically to H.264, though I haven't used
it, I've heard good things about Elgato's Turbo.264, which is a USB-based
hardware encoder that can both significantly reduce CPU load and cut down
on conversion time:

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/Accessories/Turbo264/product1.en.html

At a retail of $100, it's not badly priced either (looks like they have
some MacWorld special pricing going on right now, fyi).

- Nate

> [0] http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/ - Worth the $23.32 for
> simplicity.  Only formats I can't convert from that I've wanted to are
> .mkv
> and .rmvb
>
> [1] Got me to thinking that if I were going to do any crazy amounts of
> transcoding, it might be worth it to get an octocore Dell SC1430 when
> Dell's
> got some kind of special going on and get OSx86 going on it to get up to 8
> encodes going at a time.  The jobs are dispatched on a file-by-file basis,
> not parallelizing the transcoding of an individual file, so this is only
> suitable for overall throughput, not "latency" of getting things
> transcoded
> quickly.