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A Distributed DivX Ripper?
RJ asks: "I know much about Java/C++ and
sockets programming and I'd like to use this knowledge to build a distributed program to rip a DVD into DivX. It will work by breaking the job into chunks, sending chunks to other computers to encode, then patching it back together.
Despite my searching efforts, I have been unable to find a decent resource to teach me how to program the DivX core to encode mpeg2 and re-join parts. I'm hoping that some readers of slashdot can point me in the right direction?"
- Reading around 4 gigs of data in a fairly fast time: not much of an issue on a normal computer, but distributed computing might introduce issues with speeds of the network.
- Deencoding the mpeg2: this seems to me to be the biggest slow down. The problem seems to one of not having a fast enough decoder that is capable of good image output. Distributed computing would help, but it seems to me to be somewhat of a macgyvered solution to the real problem.
- Resizing, cropping etc: not much of an issue, but of course distributed computing would help.
- Mpeg4 encoding: Again, one of the major problems seems to be with fairly slow encoding alogarithims. Therefore, helped by distributed computing.
I'm sure setting up a beowulf cluster of computers or some other setup seems to be nice and all that, but unless you're reencoding several dvds a day, it seems like a normal athlon would probably do the trick, and working on the code for better decoding and coding of the various codec would seem to me to be a more efficient way of improving speed. I know that I can reencode a dvd at half real time with 1-pass divx 5 encoding and flaskmpeg, and a 1/4 real time with 2-pass encoding, and I've only got a Athlon 1.4. So unless you are reencoding Das Boot quite a bit, it seems to me like one normal high powered consumer computer would be plenty sufficient.Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Watch this post get modded up, and not my qualified response to the From Coder to Game Designer question. Humbug!
Anyway, as brought up in the last Ask Slashdot remotely similar to this one (Archiving DVD's with Linux), dvd::rip, which is a Perl+GTK front-end to transcode, has a fairly insecure cluster mode, whereby it will split up the video transcoding task among however many machines you can coerce into doing it, and rip and mux the audio with the video on the host machine.
Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Now someone go mod up that other answer of mine. Please?
Vidomi is a badass little program to turn mpg, vob, ... into DivX. One of the recently added features is "Distributed Encoding" (read: Scalability via network slaves).
This answer your question?