Parallel video encoding

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

Let's say I have a box with a multitude of CPU cores on multiple
physical CPUs and i wanted to utilize mencoder to gain maximal total
CPU usage.  Any ideas?  I am not sure that mencoder is fully
multi-threaded, and even if so, it can only run on one physical CPU at
a time, right?

$ time $(for i in $(find . -type f | grep -i foo); do mencoder "$i"; done)

Can you think of a way to make this exec all in parallel, and if so,
and even so, would this not be efficient to do because of some
fundamental issue?  For instance, how would this affect caching in the
CPUs?  Considering you know the application is a video encoder, what
properties can we exploit to gain the fastest CPU time to encode all
the videos?  Let's say it is an arbitrary amount, but more than the
number of cores you have.  This is an interesting problem and I should
probably ask Pixar :-)  But you guys are a cheap start!
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen