autogk, network encoding possible?

[lumis]

i used to use vidomi for encoding my dvd's to divx/xvid a few years ago, it was very simple & powerful.. i loved the program.. it even let me make use of the other computers on my home network, so they could all encode the movie.. i could have 5 p3 500-833mhz machines working on one movie, it was super fast!

but vidomi doesnt work anymore, not with any of the newer codecs.. i do like autogk, but i am kind of dissappointed in its flexibility.. aside from that, it's a great one-click program.. but i would really really like to be able to do network encoding with it.. is this even possible?

[celtic_druid]

You can use AVISynth so that one computer processes the script and the other just encodes. However I assume that Vidmoi was doing something like splitting the video up, encoding in sections and rejoining? This would screw up the rate control anyway.

[Soopafresh]

I can think of a way to do it via copying a single VOB file to each machine in the render farm. The tricky part is ensuring final file size- (eg-if you insist the final file is 700MB). You wouldn't even need AutoGK - instead, you could use the command line app called AVS2AVI to create an XVID AVI out of your VOB.

The other way would be to still copy one single VOB to each render machine, then connect remotely via UltraVNC and kick off the AutoGK app on each system.

[lumis]

well, it's been a while.. but basically what you would do is create a simple file that gave the ip addresses of the other computers on the networks, you then ran vidomi in "slave mode" on the other computers, you started up vidomi on the main computer with the dvd files, opened the file that contained the ip addresses, and then start encoding.. it would use all the machines on the network & your encode speeds were awesome.. if you were at work, and you had like 20 computers working on one dvd it would finish in like 20/30 minutes.

[Soopafresh]

Just thought of an idea. Keep the entire VOB set on a machine you designate as the "Server". The other machines will map a drive letter to the server machine.

Find out how many frames there are in the project, divide by the number of render nodes, and automatically update this info in each machine's .AVS script via the TRIM(x,y) setting. Actually, keep each machine's .AVS file on the server box, so you can easily make the changes.

[celtic_druid]

As I said though if you encode in pieces you screw up the rate control. Hitting a filesize still shouldn't be too big of a problem, but quality will suffer.

Guess you could run the first passes, join the stats, calculate how large each chunk should be and then do the 2nd passes.