Video Conversion for Parallel/Gird Connected PCs

[Alterego]

Hello All,

I can be considered a novice to the world of digital video conversion/editing and so on. Whatever I have learned is all courtesy of Videohelp.com , it certainly is an awesome site where experts are kind enough to share thier guides/tips/tutorials/advices.

Have been pretty successful in my ventures till today, mainly concerned with digital video formats and ability to render on Upnp/DLNA devices like PS3. As from all reviews and technical info available its established that AVC/H.264 is a much greater improvement in video encoding at reasonable file sizes, especially for the rips of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs.

While encoding some of my own DVDs to Mp4 having H.264/x264 video codec, a considerable amount of time was required if the quality settings were kept high to avoid any loss of video/quality. It even took a day and a half for my Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHZ, 2gb RAM to run continually and finally do the job. Tried doing is using various programes like FairUse Wizard and XVID4PSP. The XVID conversion is pretty much what I use mainly due to its reasonable encoding times.

The only thing I wanted to ask, and it maybe a silly question is that I have another Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz desktop lying idle. Is their a way to connect both PCs lin parallel/gird formation and then run a video conversion program which can split the encoding job onto 2 interconnected PCs and can run in a distributed computing environment thus balancing load and doing the job efficiently. This can certainly reduce the encoding time the amount of load on each processor.

Do i fantasy for too much, or is there a solution like this possible on any particular OS with specific software. Please share your views.

Regards,
AlterEgo.

[ronnylov]

In theory it is possible. You can do it manually by splitting your video to two parts and encode them simultaneusly on both computers and afterwards put the slices together.

There is a video editing package for linux called cinerella that can be used in a render farm setup but I do not know exactly what the benefits are.

There seems to be an option in DVDRebuilder also according to this:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_rebuilder_tutorial_advanced_page_8.cfm

[Vid-Kid]

It is my understanding that the Transcode utility in Linux can do what you are after. And it's free.

[Alterego]

Thanks Gentlemen,

Anyone else with a much practical insight to the topic. Can it be done under windows environment. Maybe using Windows 2003 Cluster Server and then calling up a specific program which can assign different agents/workers to parallel processors in a cluster.

The discussion is open for all of the gurus to jump in. Has anyone done this at any level.

Regards.
AlterEgo

[ronnylov]

x264 farm can be run in windows:
http://omion.dyndns.org/x264farm/x264farm.html
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=117889

[fredfillis]

I think vegas can do this also. Try jetdv.com