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

Re:ffmpeg

[sexconker]

Too bad Final Cut Pro is trash.

Any of the various free and extensible encoders / tools are infinitely better than FCP for video conversion.

Editing video with lame effects and such is another story, since the free (open) shit tends to not have GUIs worth a damn. But what do you expect? It's all geared at converting commercial stuff for piracy.

Re:ffmpeg

[evilviper]

Or just convert 2 videos at once, or 4 for a quad core etc. They did suggest they have lots to convert, and it's a pretty easy way to get all available cores working hard.

More to the point, multi-threading introduces overhead, and quality loss in the encoded video. So, if you do have at least as many videos as you have cores, encoding each, single-threaded, on it's own core, will be slightly faster, and slightly higher quality than encoding those same videos sequentially, using a codec with multi-threading.