The H.264 video codec is very good. Great compression and excellent quality. The only problem is, encoding is slow. It takes about six hours on my Intel dual core iMac to encode a typical movie, which makes it an overnight endeavour.
Well there is the Elgato Turbo 264-, a USB hardware encoder, which is about to come out. It’s supposed to speed the encoding up by 2-4 times, which is still not necessarily real-time. Yeah I want it done better than real-time, like we rip music CDs at 8x speed!
Check this out: Monster Muck Mashup – Mass Video Conversion Using AWS. USD1.78 and 20 minutes to encode ~2GB of video. The only problem is, it takes around 3 hours to upload 2GB of data, assuming 200KB sustained uplink speed. Unless you are running some sort of YouTube copycat and have all the data stored online this solution isn’t so applicable to the guy who merely wants to rip his DVDs for viewing on the iPod or PSP. Interesting solution nonetheless.