The quite popular Logitech C920 webcam used to natively support H.264, but they dropped it in a model revision a while ago, because "nearly every computer offered in the market features a chipset that can efficiently encode high definition video at 1080p" [1].

I've used that very camera (without the accelerator) on an RPi 4 myself, and the only way to get acceptable quality was by using the Pi's H.264 hardware encoder.

[1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources...

I got a metal box with HDMI and an ethernet ports which encodes the HDMI video + audio and serves/publishes H.264 RTMP/TS segments. My intended use case was actually working with Pi's on live streams, installing fresh systems and the like where encoding might not be available anyway.

I couldn't find the one online but it looks like there are a few out there. Side note/tangent, the Pi3 was powerful enough to transcode 720p down to lower resolutions in real time.

From what I can tell, they mostly live in video cards at this point.

There used to be an elgator capture card with some encoding, i _think_/

El Gato has one, it's really nice: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/game-capture-4k60-pro