FPGA to solve the two most annoying problems on usenet - Suggestions

As you all know, downloading files from usenet leaves you with two
sets of files.. The rar files from what you're downloading and the
par2 files for incomplete file repair.

If anyone has attempted to download anything in the 8GB range, you'll
find that well.. if you're missing enough parts of the file, the par2
recovery can be a painful, painful process taking up to three hours in
some cases.

I'm sick of it.

So, here's the idea. Use a FPGA to do the reed-solomon decoding to
accelerate the PAR2 repair/recovery process. The system should utilize
a USB connection to pipe data directly from the disk to the FPGA that
will do the offboard processing of the data. The data transfer should
be controlled by an application on the computer.

Second Problem..

The XBOX 360 doesn't play x.264 and all the good movies are in x.264.
Converting from x.264 to h.264 could be done offboard on an FPGA
because it takes for-ever to complete on my system (8 hours). This
should have the same premise as the previous issue, minus using a x.
264 decoding core and possibly directly converting it to h.264 or
doing a decompression-recompression..

SPECS: The development system i'm using is the XILINX ML-505 board
with the Virtex 5 chip. This is a open-source project being done for
fun and learning btw.

Suggestions / Comments / Complaints?