I tried the Avivo video encoder to accelerate my encoding time. I saw a significant improvement however i use Radeon X300 which has a 325 Mhz clock speed.

If I was to try to encode a video on a better video card with a higher clock speed (say 500 Mhz), how much of a performance boost will it give?

Ideally I want to take a 20 min video and encode it into H.264 in 2 minutes or less. It currently takes me 5 - 8 minutes. Perhaps I can get a hardware video encoder?

Note: this was tested on an opteron 1.8 ghz cpu with 2gb of ram.

Several questions as I try to decide when to buy an iMac:
1. When will systems with Mac OS Leopard be available?
2. What's new in Leopard that a casual user might find worth waiting for?
3. Will the news systems which come out hand-in-hand with Leopard offer significant hardware benefits or improvements over the current family of iMacs, e.g. performance, lower cost, etc.

I'm not to keen on buying an iMac now and upgrading to Leopard later ... unless the upgrade price is very low. I know that some of the information I seek is not officially released by Apple, so answers based on past Apple history is just fine!

Thanks for all your help.