It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.
The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.
The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.
Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.
After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.
I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.
