Which Open Source Video Apps Use SMP Effectively?

ydrol writes "After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, I was ready to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had not seen before. However, I was disappointed to discover that a lot of the conversion tools either don't use SMP at all, or don't balance the workload evenly across processors, or require ugly hacks to use SMP (e.g. invoking distributed encoding options). I get the impression that open source projects are a bit slow on the uptake here? Which open source video conversion apps take full native advantage of SMP? (And before you ask, no, I don't want to pick up the code and add SMP support myself, thanks.)"

Comments

Use Mac OS X...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I realize this is somewhat of a troll comment in since the poster already said he bought PC hardware...

But Mac users have been living with SMP since 2001 (in the early 2000's Apple began shipping most their professional desktops with multiple processors). As such, almost all Mac multimedia and conversion tools are multi-threaded.

I'd assume Linux would have pretty good SMP support too due to the wide range of hardware it targets, although most consumer x86 machines up until a few years ago where single core. Us Mac users view Windows as sort of a toy in regards to SMP. It's kind of funny to see them just adding SMP support to a lot of software within the next few years, whereas on the Mac it's been essential to code for SMP up until the G5 because the G4 processors where slower by themselves.

Re:x264

[kesuki]

now if only h264 didn't use atrocious, buggy, awful non-burned in subtitles that don't render correctly if you're missing the 'fonts' (especially the foreign language fonts!) the encoder assumed everyone in the world has!

there is a reason the non-burned in subtitles in DVDs are so atrocious looking it's so that EVERY DVD player could do subtitles right.

I've even had non-burned in subtitles CRASH VLC media player!!! WTF do they only think of windows media player version 20.9.1029.3! or whatever it is they use?

if a file is available in avi and MKV format i always go with AVI because the subtitles look so much better! they don't crowd each other, they don't 'grow larger that the screen border' when you maximize the screen, they don't 'stay so long you can't read the next piece of text'

ugh i hate mkvs you know they could just burn in the subtitles, but because mkv is a container they don't bother.. it's like slacking on the subtitle quality control, they don't even need to preview how it works, cause it's not like people are going to say 'make a version 2 so i can see all the subtitles right!'