[m_eiman]

I've used Elgato's Turbo.264 dongle, and as far as I'm concerned it did a good job. It cost roughly $150, and outperformed any software encoding I could manage by a large margin. Of course, if I had the money to build a dedicated computer and figure out the settings to ffmpeg (or some other software encoder) I might get even better results, but for my needs (MacBook, don't want to learn the intricacies of encoding) it's perfect.

I think that quite a few "ordinary consumers" would share my opinion. If they don't mind spending hours or days compiling and tweaking a delicate chain of open source software, they're not "ordinary" - they're power users.

[ZeroGravitas]

I looked into the same dongle (also for a Macbook) and the general impression I got was that it was maybe better than Apple's Quicktime on slower machines but that you could easily beat it with open source encoders. The only reason it is difficult to make the comparison is that the software encoders generally didn't take the same shortcuts as the hardware encoder because they didn't feel the quality tradeoffs were worth it.

This was a while ago, but I have no reason to think the software encoders haven't improved faster than the hardware.

edit: rereading your post I see your main problem with the software solution is "spending hours or days compiling and tweaking a delicate chain of open source software". I can't help but note that if that is the case then you're doing it wrong™.

[m_eiman]

I can't help but note that if that is the case then you're doing it wrong™.

Most likely, but since ffmpeg has the least helpful documentation I've seen (for a newbie at least), I'm not surprised.