How to permanently set higher process priority in GUI

[Tony Baechler - BATS]

Hi all,


I'm having a bit of a problem.  When transcoding video from .mpg to other 
formats like .mp4, it's really slow.  On the server, the process takes maybe 
a minute or two, but on the desktop, even after several minutes, it wasn't 
done and it's only a 7 minute video.  This is with ffmpeg.  I was thinking 
perhaps the problem has to do with ffmpeg not getting a high enough 
priority.  On the server, it does not have X and everything is done from the 
command line, so I can simply run "nice -19 ffmpeg $@" and it works. 
However, with the desktop, that isn't really possible because the user has 
no command line knowledge and obviously doesn't want to go into Terminal 
every time.

Both the server and desktop are running Ubuntu 14.04 with the Trusty 
multimedia repository added.  We have tried handbrake, winff and another GUI 
frontend.  I personally don't use the GUI and I'm of little help here, but I 
think winff is the best option because it uses ffmpeg, but I'm not positive 
on this.  We are using the real ffmpeg with all extra and nonfree codecs, 
not libav-tools which is the default.  The desktop has at least 4 GB of RAM, 
two cores and is running Xubuntu.  Here are my questions:

1. How can I guide the user to set ffmpeg to always have the max priority 
and memory so it doesn't take forever to transcode a video?  I think the 
desktop is 32-bit, but I'm not positive.  This needs to be a permanent 
setting which works automatically so he doesn't have to set it every time. 
Is such a thing possible?

2. Is there a faster, more efficient video converter GUI instead of those 
mentioned above?  It must support either .mp4 or .webm and must generally be 
able to do the right thing without the user having much knowledge.  It also 
should let the user pick the output bitrate as we don't want huge files. 
The idea is to upload the video to the server for streaming.  We are using 
jPlayer for this and we have a web-based upload script.

Thanks very much.  As I mentioned, I'm familiar with the command line, but I 
really have no idea about the GUI and I don't have X installed on my 
machine, so I can't be of much help.  If you have a better way of doing 
things, please mention it.  I could be wrong about setting the higher 
priority, but on two machines, setting the priority higher with schedtool or 
nice seems to make a difference.