Hardware h.264 encoding needed

[Matt Johnston]

Looking for options to encode h.264 at realtime or faster. So far the only options seem to be a Matrox MXO2 Mini with MAX - connected via Thunderbolt (I'm on a Macbook usually). That's a lot of hardware for just h.264 since I don't really need the input/output of the box.

A Matrox CompressHD card looks great. But I would need a thunderbolt expansion chassis which doesn't actually exist right now, and then Matrox would need to make thunderbolt drivers, so who knows?

There is also the elgato h.264 USB stick. But mixed reports on if it actually works with Premiere and the like.

Any other possible solutions?

[Barend Onneweer]

I get close to realtime h264 compression (in 1080p) in Adobe Media Encoder. And this is on a 3 year old machine. You should try it.

[Matt Johnston]

I get close to realtime h264 compression (in 1080p) in Adobe Media Encoder. And this is on a 3 year old machine. You should try it.

I certainly don't. On my quad core Macbook in media encoder it's about 3-4x realtime.

[Uli Plank]

What about the Turbo HD USB stick from Elgato?

[Chris McKechnie]

I certainly don't. On my quad core Macbook in media encoder it's about 3-4x realtime.

Are you setting it to "Maximum Render Quality?" Remember, MRQ should only be selected if you're doing scaling, as it doesn't really have any effect on the overall quality (at least it didn't in 5.5).

[Adam Eden]

Sorrenson V8 and above use CUDA and works a lot faster than realtime on my Z800 with an fx5000 card

[Alexander Mejia]

Keep in mind that CUDA based encoders (today) are still draft quality, and a final export should be done on a high end software output for maximum efficiency.