[MEncoder-users] Mencoder and PVM support

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

The Wanderer <wanderer <at> fastmail.fm> writes:

> On 09/19/2011 06:36 AM, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:
> 
> > Markus Mohr <m.mohr <at> gmx.de> writes:
> > 
> >> I have a project to confirm. I want to add PVM-support to Mencoder
> > 
> > You should probably add what PVM is (and why you don't want to implement it
> > in FFmpeg if it is a media format).
> 
> According to VERA, PVM is "Parallel Virtual Machine".

And I was absolutely sure he wants to re-encode HP Photo Album files...

> If that's what he's
> talking about, then he probably means the ability to process a single task -
> such as an encode - on multiple machines, treating them all as one big,
> heterogenous, high-communication-latency multi-core processor.

I implemented this twice in the past for a rendering system, once using "Simple
Sockets Library", once the remote object facilities of GNUstep. At the time,
hardware was so slow that transferring sources and a rendered frame via network
had little impact on the overall performance. I do not believe this is true now
with current hardware and the requirements of real-world encoding (B-frames come
to mind).

If this is done, it should certainly be implemented in FFmpeg, and please test
actual multithreaded performance and the inter-process communication
requirements first.

Carl Eugen