I think this is the first proper hardware H264 encoding system that I've been able to actually use and it was easy to use.

Trying to finish the 40 odd minute timelapse video from the roadtrip I went on last year and the slowest part (apart from me bothering to finish it) is rendering a 40 odd minute 1080p video. On my laptop (Core i5 2450m) I think it took at least a couple of hours when I last rendered the video using just the CPU. I looked into CUDA stuff for linux and there didn't seem to be an easy way to drop an uncompressed video on my linux HTPC system with a relatively new nvidia card and output a video using hardware encoding.

I found a plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder that makes it use the Intel Quick Sync hardware encoder that my CPU/GPU has and it rendered the video in about 30 mins. It certainly made me happy.

Only problem will be uploading ~4GB to YouTube :((