Improving ffmpeg transcode speed

[jwilson]

I have an application that uses ffmpeg to transcode 30 second videos from mov, 3gp and various mp4s to a standardized mp4 format. It works great, but the average transcode time is 6 seconds, no matter how much CPU I throw at it. My transcoding boxes have 24 cores and setting "-threads 24" doesn't seem to speed it up any. I use "-threads auto" and it uses 4 cores for the same amount of time.

My question is a two-parter - one, is there anything I can do to speed up the process on my existing machines, and two, is there any sort of hardware solution I can use to speed it up instead of my generic Xeon servers? For example, a hardware encoder/decoder?

[chicken264]

How about 24 instances? I don't know.

[jwilson]

How about 24 instances? I don't know.

I'm running 20 instances, that's not the issue. I'd like to find ways to improve the transcode speed - either optimizations I can do to ffmpeg, or specialized hardware recommendations.

[chicken264]

How about 24 instances? I don't know.

I'm running 20 instances, that's not the issue. I'd like to find ways to improve the transcode speed - either optimizations I can do to ffmpeg, or specialized hardware recommendations.

If it you are converting to x264, the only method I know is
ultrafast, superfast, veryfast presets.

ultrafast is fastest.

[jwilson]

That is exactly the kind of info I needed, thanks!