By Andrew Liszewski
If you prefer to convert movies and TV shows to portable formats yourself instead of buying them from a service like iTunes then you’re probably painfully aware that it can be a very slow process. Even on a blazing PC converting a 2-hour movie can take at least twice as long as the film itself which usually leads to many overnight conversions.
But believe it or not there are much faster solutions out there. Broadcast professionals for example who post their shows or newscasts online need a very quick turnaround for converting their content so they take advantage of dedicated hardware solutions that can convert media at real-time speeds or faster. The downside of course is that these products have always been very expensive and complicated but ADS Tech has just released a consumer friendly solution.
The Instant Video To-Go is about the size of a standard USB flash drive and contains hardware accelerators for converting media to the H.264 format which is playable on many portable media devices including the iPod video. Is it worth buying though? Well consider that on average it takes about 5 hours to encode a 2-hour movie to a portable format with just software. With the addition of the Instant Video To-Go the conversion process takes about 20 minutes. If you watch a lot of TV or movies on portable devices I would definitely consider this a must-have.
Best of all the Instant Video To-Go is available online for only $64.99.
[ Instant Video To-Go ] VIA [ Crave ]
I use a program called PQ DVD to IPod Video Suite for converting my DVD’s and other media to IPod format, and it coverts the files in half the time it would take to watch them. The program costs less than this gadget and does a great job.
this is a terrible product. The software can’t handle DVDs (only individual vobs are ripped, movies spanning more than one vob can’t be done). It doesn’t respect aspect ratios. And, you can’t set the encoding options (making it incompatible with AppleTV).
Yes, terrible.. I own that converter and it never really worked as expected.
It seems the reason is the trashy software Media Converter 2.0 from ArcSoft bundled with the stick. Til now ADS made no effort to change the situation by offering proper software support. Despite all my efforts I haven’t found any alternative software which eventually could drive that stick.
Werner