How about distributed squeezing or community squeezing?

[rxnelson]

Unfortunately my BTV server is only a P4 HT machine. This means x264 encoding takes plenty of time making it nearly useless. However, on my gaming rig (dual-core 2 gig ram etc.) it takes significantly less time. That got me to thinking....what if I could use them both? I haven't tested it out but there is something out there called x264 farm that made me think it could be a reality? Anyway, just wanted to get people to dream big whether it be just using your link machine(s), every computer on your home network, or even every snapstream user that opts in to it to do the squeezing.......Just thinking out loud.

Thoughts?

[rxnelson]

Nothing, huh? Wrong forum?

[Khris]

10 Print "Already been suggested."
20 Pause
30 Print "Nothing came of it."
40 Pause
50 Goto 10

[tscales]

I love the idea. I do it manually, by moving shows and manually starting the compression, but that's a pain.

For now, I just threw hardware at it.

[rxnelson]

tscales
How fast does a quad core do an hour of HD to mp4?

[tscales]

mp4 is still time-consuming. Remember I'm compressing from 1920x1080i down to iPhone size. It takes about 1:45 for an 1:00 show.

Also remember, though, I can do four of them concurrently, so the effective time is something like 25 minutes.

[DonK]

If there's any sharing of the recordings over the internet in your idea, I can guarantee SS wouldn't do it, it opens them to a great many lawsuits and harrassment from the MPAA and TV networks.

I know I wouldn't do it if I were SS.

[rxnelson]

tscales,

an hour 40 isn't too bad. I guess I had the idea to "throw more hardware at it" but in a different way.

Donk,
No kidding.

I am more interested in getting all my home network machines to join in on the fun. I don't think we could come to an agreement as a group anyway on even what parameters we wanted to use to compress unless it was for the iStuff.

If was was a community effort I was hoping they could get around it because you aren't up/downloading a show...only a piece of it.

[Khris]

Setup BTV upon completion of the recording to copy it to another networked computer.

On that networked computer, use something like DirMon to look for new files and as soon as a new file arrives, triggers an external compressor.

That's about the only way to even come close to distributing the task right now.

[tscales]

I think distributed locally is reasonable. Between users would be difficult and have legal implications.

I had almost finished a program that would monitor a directory and compress (with BTV) anything that showed up, but when 4.7 added the ability to compress and THEN run the CustomPostProcessor, I didn't need it anymore.

[rxnelson]

I just checked the forum on x264farm and someone made a mod of meGUI but it looks like at first glance it only converts to .mkv. Frick!

Hey Snapstream. 4.72 .mkv support.......please?

If I get time I may give it a whirl anyway just to see if it works. Computer busy doing a traditional encode right now anyway.