Hardware Converters / Conversion Accelerators

[GrayStrickland]

Is anyone making a hardware video converter / conversion accelerator? Which outputs to popular formats (e.g. Divx, Xvid, etc.)? At a reasonable price?

I ask because I'm intrigued by the new AdsTech "Instant Video to Go" usb video converter. It looks like a usb thumb-drive, costs $80.00 and boasts conversion from just about anything to H.264 in 1/5th of realtime (convert 1:40:00 in 0:20:00). I haven't bought one, because I'm not really interested in converting to H.264 (I don't have a video iPod or Sony PSP and my Philips DVP642 will not [I believe] play h.264 files).

But it sounds cool.

So that has me wondering what else is out there that might do the same as the AdsTech thingy, but convert to Divx or Xvid instead. Or if h.264 is going to become the new wonderformat, maybe I need to look for a dvd player that will do h.264.

Link

[celtic_druid]

Not aware of any ports of Xvid to DSP or similar, although I think someone was talking about it awhile back. For DivX I think there was some device from Plextor, although I am not sure it did the encoding in hardware and if it did, it was for realtime capture rather than porting some of the routines over to hardware.

As for the AdsTech. You'd have to see the quality first. Like ATI's Avivo that didn't use hardware at all, just really crappy settings/optimisations for the sake of speed.

[Epicurus8a]

I haven't seen any hardware converters for Divx or Xvid. I do have the ADS Tech device, though. Check this link for more info.
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1629547#1629547

(FYI:Conversions on my machine are 2 to 3 times faster, not 5 times faster.)