If the el gato Turbo.264 HD key is sufficient for the consumer electronics market, professional users are looking for higher performance level to encode videos as it takes time. Matrox announced a new product based on an extension card, known as the Compress HD.
This card available in PCI-Express format (1x) is dedicated to Mac Pro. It is purely dedicated to H.264 encoding and support all format up to 1080P at 50 MBits/s.
According to data from the manufacturer, it speeds up encoding of a 20 minutes Blu-ray 1080p video completed in 18 minutes, versus 90 minutes for a Octo Core Mac Pro (no reference regarding year model or CPU clock speed). If performance gain are confirmed by independent tests, it could be a good deal, as the price is not ridiculously high: 405 USD.
