How to permanently set higher process priority in GUI

[Tony Baechler - BATS]

On 7/18/2015 2:01 AM, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-07-18 at 01:47 -0700, Tony Baechler - BATS wrote:
>> 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.
>
> There may be a disparity between the server and the desktop in terms of
> CPU power or architecture. Especially if the desktop is only 32bit. More
> RAM on the desktop might help.

Yes, the server has 32 GB of memory and 8 cores, but that isn't entirely it. 
  On my own desktop which has the identical processor and memory (4 GB of 
RAM, two cores), the process is much faster, but I don't run X here.  The 
only difference is my desktop is 64-bit.

>
> As to making ffmpeg (or anything else for that matter) always run with a
> particular nice value, the simplest way would be to rename ffmpeg to
> ffmpeg.bin and create a script called ffmpeg that runs ffmpeg.bin with
> the appropriate nice value and whatever other special conditions you
> want. Make sure either that the script is in the same location as the
> binary, or that the user's path includes the location of the script.


Yes, I am aware of this.  If you read my question, I stated that this must 
be done from the GUI.  I do not have access to the desktop in question and I 
would have no way of installing such a script.  Also, that wouldn't work 
anyway because upgrades to ffmpeg would overwrite my script, so it wouldn't 
be permanent.  Finally, the user has no idea how to write such a script and 
there would be little point in trying to give him instructions.  As I 
understand it, you can't really set a process to the highest priority as a 
normal user, so he would have to switch to root every time.  That is way 
more complex than he wants to do without a GUI solution.

Yes, I know Ubuntu ships libav-tools, but ffmpeg is still in active 
development.  I think the only reason why Ubuntu doesn't ship it is due to 
the nonfree codecs.  After using both, I like ffmpeg better.