ADS Instant Video To-Go

It's insane that it often takes much longer to convert a video to a different format than it takes to watch the entire movie. ADS claims that its nifty littleUSB stick accelerates the process by up to five times, providing hardware acceleration to take the load off your PC. Performance is certainly impressive: it converted 1GB of MPEG3 video into PSP-friendly, 768Kb/sec MPEG4 (H.264) in 21mins 30secs; reducing the quality to 320Kb/sec and cutting the conversion time to 11mins. Nevertheless, it fell short of the promised 2GB in five minutes. The supplied ArcSoft Media Converter 2 software is simple and supports a wide range of video formats, but at £80 you'd have to be a mobile movie buff to justify the outlay.

Author: Barry Collins