A bit geeky I know but then so am I.  This is very cool. 

Elgato Systems announces the Turbo.264: a hardware encoder in USB stick format that converts video files to the H.264 (MP4) format for iPod, Apple TV, and Sony PSP. Turbo.264 accelerates exports by a factor of 4 on an Intel Core 2 Duo up to a factor of 10 on a PowerPC G4. The Turbo.264 is able to offload the computationally intensive software conversion of video files away from your Macintosh, leaving it free for other tasks–a virtual co-processor for the Mac. Turbo.264 supports all Macs…
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Source: Turbo.264 USB video encoding ”thumb device” announced by Elgato