By "high speed" I mean "can encode a 4.3GB MPEG-2 file to 50% compression in 12 minutes."
And it's a piece of software, not hardware.

Intercom Corporation announced o­n the 5th the development of a software MPEG-2 transcoding engine that uses an independently developed data compression technology. The company plans o­n offering the software OEM to makers of PCs with recording functions, and authoring software companies, as well as including it in their own software.

Re-encoding processes up until now have consisted of decoding video data o­n o­ne side, then encoding it so that it fits into the desired size. o­n this engine, however, the data is "halfway" decoded, and then encoded to fit the desired size. Because of this, the company was able to simplify the re-encode process and shorten the job time.

According to a test carried out by Intercom, their engine took 12 minutes and 26 seconds to compress a 4.3GB (60 minute) MPEG-2 data stream to 50% (2.15GB), while other companies' softwares took about 1 hour, 29 minutes, and 12 seconds. The test system was a Pentium 4 3GHz with 512MB of memory running Windows XP Professional.

On the quality side of things, the engine uses the "Dynamic Index Operation System," so the video quality is said to "not be inferior to the original."

 The Dynamic Index Operation System, an algorithm announced by Intercom in April, analyses the appearance of block data and compression patterns, and conversions are carried out using a high efficiency conversion table. This is the company's first engine in Japan to use the algorithm.

Inspired by:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20040705/intercom.htm

Press Release:
http://www.intercom.co.jp/news/release/040702_zcopy.html