Elgato has announced a rather unique product call the Turbo 264 that will speed up encoding H.264 on Macs. The device is a USB stick that acts as a hardware based H.264 encoder. It is supposed to speed up encoding up to 2-4 times, which will leave you free to work on other tasks on the host computer. It is meant for encoding video to iPod, iPhone, etc., but will also work from any video program that is Quicktime based (think Final Cut Pro). Look for Elgato’s Turbo 264 near the end of April for 99 Euros or ~$132.
