[MPlayer-users] MPlayer support of bi-processors systems

[daniel carter]

Rick wrote:

>[Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
>
>hmm.. a cluster.. huh?
>that would mean completely porting it using either pvm or mpi...  a completely retarded and pointless task...
>

Need need to use any fancy parallel machine APIs.  Video encoding is 
well suited to doing in chunks.  If you've got two machines, one does 
the first half, the other does the 2nd half.  Quite simple and gives 
good effciency.  An 8 CPU cluster should get close to 8 times performance.

The difficult part is getting the chunks back togeather into one gapless 
file, but i think that problem has been solved by many programs.  Just 
offhand i imagine it could be solved if the chunks include overlap from 
neighbours.

>
> if one can afford the high speed 
>interconnects needed to make any cluster effecient, one can afford a single 
>computer fast enough to do anything that mplayer could need
>
Hmm, where can i buy a machine that will encode faster than a cluster of 
16 AthlonXP2000s  ?