[MPlayer-users] mencoder "cluster"?

[RC]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:49:09 -0600
Richi Plana <mymplayer at richip.dhs.org> wrote:

> You see, the way dvdrip clustering works, it relies on the source
> multimedia data to be accessible on the cluster slaves. This is
> usually done via NFS, but other virtual filesystems should work. 

Yes, but since you're using SSH anyhow, I'd think it would be more
desireable to just also use it for copying the chunks of the video, and
not requiring the configuration and poor performance of NFS.

> Can one break down an input video into sections and tell mencoder to
> work on a certain section only? 

Yes, using -edl you could do potentially that but I don't recomend it. 
It isn't really designed for it, so it would take a lot of steps to get
it to do the job without dropping frames, or accidentally splitting in
the worst possible place.  It also may have some bugs, depending on how
you use it (see -hr-edl-seek)...  

As opposed to avisplit, which is brain-dead simple, designed for the
job, and and does it quite well.

> What would these "blocks" be? Frames?

GOPs (Group Of Pictures).  

> I can't see why the first pass in a 2-pass encoding scheme couldn't be
> done that way.

It could, but writing a program to do extensive interrogation of the
file to find the best split points, and doing matching processing on the
divx2pass.log file isn't exactly trivial.

> I do have a couple of fast machines, and believe me ... after getting
> used to dvdrip clustering, it's kind of hard going back to 1-machine
> processing. It takes so much longer and, personally, I'd rather make
> use of the otherwise spare cycles.

Personally, I'd just simultaneously encode a different video on each
machine.  Not difficult to setup a queue to manage that.