Update: XLR8YourMac.com is now keeping on top of comparisons of rendering with different Mac's as well as some encoding issues. This is good. Shows that on Quad G5's that using the Turbo.264 is slower than the CPU's although Turbo.264 does free up the CPU to do other things.
Elgato is the maker of the EyeTV product that adds Tivo-esque capability to your Mac. They've just released the Turbo.264 which is a tiny hardware encoder. It plugs into a USB2 slot and handles encoding into h.264. If you've tried encoding video for your iPod or now the Apple TV, you know how slow encoding h.264 is. The Turbo.264 promsises a substantial speedup--they cite a test where a 2GHz MacBook took nearly an hour to encode a 10 min. DV movie but handled the same movie in under 12 minutes with a Turbo.264 plugged in. The slower the Mac, the more boost in performance you'll get from the Turbo.264. It should retail for $99.
Turbo264 comes with its own app to handle encoding with batch capability. Turbo.264 also works with any app that uses Quicktime for encoding, including FCP, iMovie and Quicktime Player. One missing feature is that the maximum resolution is 800x600. Apple TV support up to 1280x720--too bad the Turbo.264 doesn't do any high-def video.
Update: A short review cites a doubling on encoding with a dual-core 2GHz G5. That's a lot slower than the improvements that Elgato cites for the MacBook with the same clock-speed Intel Core 2 Duo.
Update: Reg Hardware has a review with their own render tests from a MacBook Pro. They note some more impressive improvements.
Update: Another review from iLounge notes problems with de-interlacing from HD movies and give some more rendering results.
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