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Is there an app for Mac that can distribute a single video encoding job to several thread to utilize the full potential of the system?

I used an application called iFlicks to do video encoding, and as far as I know, it's single-threaded, so even though it can use all my CPU time, it cannot squeeze the best performance out of my system.

I am using a 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Also, I post it here because I heard there are multithreaded ffmpeg, but I just can't figure out how to use it. So if any "Super User" has any idea, it's much appreciated.

3 Answers 3

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Handbrake is multi-threaded and does a terrific job of encoding & transcoding video. I think it uses ffmpeg libraries.

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FFmpeg can indeed do this, for certain codecs, using the -threads option.

Not all the ffmpeg video codecs can use it, but the most important one (libx264, the open-source h.264 encoder) can. I'm not sure whether it helps with audio codecs, but they're relatively trivial anyway.

-threads 0 or -threads auto will try to use the optimal number of threads, as determined by ffmpeg. You can choose a number of thread manually with -threads n, you'll have to experiment to see if you can get a faster encode than the automatic settings.

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If you really want to utilize the full potential of your system, you can look for an application that supports Intel Quick Sync encoding, which is considerably faster at the expense of a little quality. However, since Quick Sync for video encoding is only supported on Windows, you would need to be running Boot Camp. Best Intel Quick Sync software for h.264 transcoding has a list of software that supports this feature.

(I realize this answer is only relevant to specific users, and may not be to the OP)

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