[MPlayer-users] Create tile faster than real-time?

[Jon Drukman]

I'm trying to create 4x4 "contact sheets" of thumbnails for movie files. 
  I've got it to work using this command line:

~/mplayer -quiet -ao null -vo jpeg:outdir=test -vf 
scale=180:135,framestep=341,tile=4:4:16 file.avi

I run identify to find the FPS and LENGTH, by which I derive the total 
number of frames, then I use framestep so that I get 16 evenly-spaced 
frames from the movie.  Unfortunately to run this, it takes the duration 
of the movie.  It seems like it's playing "in real time" even though 
there's no video output.  To transcode the video to another format takes 
much less than the actual duration of the movie so I am pretty sure the 
machine could go faster (it's beefy - dual opteron with plenty of RAM).

Any way to get it to go faster?

-jsd-