Elgato offers European EyeTV and turbo.264 discounts until October 7

I've been using the the turbo.264 since it came it and it continues to blow me away. If you render 2 or TV shows or movies into iTunes 640x480 per day like me it's a very inexpensive way to exend the life of an older mac by at least 12 months. I shall be taking advantage of the offer and buying another for my new iMac!

h.264 doesn't really sit well with distributed encoding; it is very linear, the next part of the encoding process can't start until the current one has finished. Encoding appears to run faster on dual core machines because they can dedicate one core for encoding and they other can do stuff like UI, USB, storage etc. Ever try encoding on a single-core machine; everything is slowed down.
The turbo.264 has dedicated encoding chips; allowing you to dump all the heavy-lifting of the encoding process to specialized chips; the Computer CPU only has to manage data storage and USB; all the encoding is "outsourced" to the turbo.264
In your situation, a turbo.264 will improve encoding speed, allowing you to realistically convert your content to iTunes-compatible h.264 without disrupting your recording. The only bottle-neck would be Disk-IO and USB, since the two tuners and the turbo.264 would all be running through the USB, and trying to write to the same disk at the same time. It may pay to get an external Firewire HDD to take the load of the Internal Laptop SATA drive.

id love to be able to make eyetv videos work in itunes and what not, but since i do it on a dual core mac mini with 2 tuners, i need that processing power elsewhere. does anyone have a solution for this? would the el gato h264 stick REALLY help that much or would i just wait a little less?

is there some sort of 'distributed encoding'?