Distributed video encoding: Development and implementation of methods to distribute computationally difficult work

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile media devices has cultivated the desire to have video on the go. These devices are ultra-compact and have a fraction of the storage space of a modern computer. For these devices to hold onto a reasonable amount of video, such video must be encoded or transcoded to a format compatible with most devices and that takes up very little space. This process of video encoding is extremely difficult work for the processor and takes long amounts of time. Finding an ability to distribute this work among several computers would drastically reduce the encoding time for any given file. Utilizing open source tools, we developed a method for splitting a video file and distributing the encoding process across several computers resulting in a smaller total encode time compared to a single computer doing the same work. It is clear that distributing this computationally difficult work can potentially deliver higher quality video more quickly than current standards.