[~bash $]

I read somewhere that certain cards supports hardware encoding of H.264 (including the MBP). Are there any drivers written that can take advantage of this?

[mduell]

It has hardware decoding acceleration, not encoding.

You can use it by just booting into Windows and using their video player app.

[Waragainstsleep]

If you want hardware encoding, there is a USB hardware encoder stick made by Elgato I think. Frees up your CPU as well as speeding the encoding process slightly. Don't expect miracles though, .h264 just takes ages to encode no matter what.

[PaperNotes]

For ATI X1600 and X1900 owners, there's a free Windows utility included with the Catalyst 7.9 package that uses the GPU for video encoding.

[~bash $]

thanks, I was wondering about that elgato product. Depending on the disc I get somewhere in the 50 -90 fps range on my Mac Pro (2.0), if I remember correctly, which isn't bad. Can the elgato beat that? I wouldn't mind having my processors back for, you know, real work.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by PaperNotes 

For ATI X1600 and X1900 owners, there's a free Windows utility included with the Catalyst 7.9 package that uses the GPU for video encoding.

IIRC the AVIVO Media Encoder (what I assume you're referring to) only uses the GPU for decoding and uses the CPU for encoding.

Originally Posted by ~bash $ 

thanks, I was wondering about that elgato product. Depending on the disc I get somewhere in the 50 -90 fps range on my Mac Pro (2.0), if I remember correctly, which isn't bad. Can the elgato beat that? I wouldn't mind having my processors back for, you know, real work.

It's not much faster than your Mac Pro, but it would free up your CPUs to do other tasks.
Note that the Turbo.264 is pretty crippled in terms of what encoding features it supports, similar to Quicktime (actually the same subset I think).