If you’re frustrated with how long it takes to convert your videos into a format that can be played back on your portable device, this new device promises to significantly reduce the time required to encode videos into the popular H.264/.mp4 encoding format used by both the iPod and PSP among others.
The ADS InstantVideo To-Go is a portable USB encoding accelerator which claims to encode at the rate of about 5 minutes of video every 1 minute. Typical software accelerators only can encode H.264 about 1 minute of video every 3 to 5 minutes, meaning that the ADS dongle should speed up encoding by as much as 15x to 25x over software solutions. Priced at $80, it’s not inexpensive for such a narrow purpose, but if your video card doesn’t have some sort of encoding acceleration (such as AMD/ATI’s Avivo-capable cards,) it might be worth it.
[via Reg Hardware]