Fed up with the hours it takes to encode video into the iPod- and PSP-friendly H.264 format? If so, the answer, according to video peripherals maker ADS Tech, is an H.264 encoding accelerator and, by sheer coincidence, it has one it would like to sell to you.

The InstantVideo To Go is a USB dongle that ties into ADS' bundled encoding app to reduce the time it takes to transcode video into H.264 dramatically. ADS claims it takes just 20 minutes to encode 100 minutes' of MPEG 2 video into an H.264 file, compared to the 300 minutes it says it would take you using a software-only encoder.

Who would use a software-only encoder these days? Certainly anyone with an Avivo-capable ATI Radeon graphics card can used the bundled Avivo Video Converter tool to run video transcoding operations through the GPU, and if AMD's quoted numbers are correct - 5 minutes to transcode 30 minutes of video - it'll take less time than the ADS product: 16.7 minutes to 20 minutes for 100 minutes of source footage.

Still, not everyone has an Avivo-capable graphics card, and for them ADS' $80 dongle might be the ideal add-on for PSP and iPod video conversion. ®