Distributed video conversion ?

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Mark

1653 posts

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#83630 19-May-2011 14:30

Hi there,

I'm in the process of converting my Blu-ray disks (sticky fingered children keep gumming them up!!) into MP4 files for playback on my AppleTV.

Ripping the Blu-rays is easy enough and I can convert the resulting files to something more suitable for the AppleTV, but the conversion on my Mac Mini is slllllloooooowwwwwwwwww! :-(

Does anyone know of any video conversion software that can spread the workload between multiple computers on the same network ? OSX, Linux or Windows is fine.

Thanks!

Mark

timmmay

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#471119 19-May-2011 14:36

I don't know anything distributed, but you can use Handbrake (free) on your fastest windows PC. Just queue them up and let it run for a week if you need it to.

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Mark

1653 posts

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#471120 19-May-2011 14:39

:-) That's what I use on my Mac now (which is my fastest computer), but I do have lots of other untapped CPU power in other network attached devices that I'm hoping I can find a use for.

Handbrake is nice (no pun intended) in that it is low priority when it runs but it still makes the machine sluggish.

Mark

wreck90

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#471129 19-May-2011 14:50

How fast do you expect to convert a bluray movie?

Mark

1653 posts

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#471134 19-May-2011 14:53

Preferably less than the 12 to 18hours per movie (45Gb of 1920x1080 video and DTS audio is a lot for a poor little Mac to read never mind reprocess to 1280x720!) ... hoping to find some sort of distributed encoder that splits the job up across multiple hosts on the LAN.

Probably wishful thinking but you never know!

wreck90

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#471139 19-May-2011 14:58

FYI - - my 2600k CPU / 8GB mem system takes handbrake about 1 hour to convert a full bluray movie to apple tv 2.

That seems reasonable to me - it has to churn through a 30gb movie file :)

Regarding distributed applications - I think you're probably out of luck.

It would be nice if handbrake supported nvidia gfx encoding acceleration.

Mark

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#471142 19-May-2011 15:02

Hmmm .. might be simpler for me to mail you my files and have you re-encode them! :-)

And hour ? Seriously ?!?! Crap I need a new computer!!

timmmay

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#471145 19-May-2011 15:05

A mac mini is really just a playback device isn't it? An old Core2 duo isn't really very much power these days, though having said that I process many GB of camera RAW files with a Core2Quad which is the same generation of processor. For video work a nice shiny sandy bridge processor would be a good idea.

Mark

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#471163 19-May-2011 15:42

Nah Mac Mini is "proper" desktop but it's only really geared for webbing/emailing and Wording ... that said when I got it it was uberspeed!

Sigh ... i suppose it was 2005 when I got it, guess time for the upgrade ... maybe an excuse for an iMac ? :-)

1080p

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#471165 19-May-2011 15:52

This has been attempted many times before but most projects have stalled or flopped. The best I have seen is from '07 here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=117889

There are also commercial solutions but they come with commercial pricing ;-)

/**EDIT**/

Whoops, take a look here: http://www.codergrid.de/

Could be a working solution.

Mark

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#471490 20-May-2011 11:20

Hmmm ... that one sounds promising, only draw back for the Linux version is that it's a binary package, for one of my systems I'd need to recompile/repackage to get it going.

I'll try it out between a few Windows and Linux virtual machines so how will it works.

Thanks!