Distributed Encoding with x264

[bnshrdr]

I am not sure whether or not this goes in the H.264/AVC board since really my questions revolve around the x264 program versus an actual programming question.

This idea has always interested me and since people are starting to talk about it more with x264, I figured for fun I would try to write a program to do this. I don't really intend for it to go public unless I actually finish it, but I have come into a couple of questions.

Here is my method now:
1)Pick a chunk size to assign jobs to (10000 frames for instance)
2)Have program check which chunks are done, and if it isn't, complete it.
3)All of these encodes go into separate files
4)Merge them all at the end

One question I have is can I just cat H.264 elementary streams? It seems to be working so far but on my samples that I've done (chunk size of 100 frames), I see a slight jump on the screen every 100 frames when viewing the final merged video.

Is there a way to index the file to make seeking faster?
Currently I'm just using the x264 switch --seek which obviously has to pass through every damn frame which can take a bit.

I know that for 2+ passes a problem arises that you have multiple log files, which for chunks of 100 frames gives bad optimization. But for large chunks is it something to really worry about?

Thanks ahead of time for any information you can throw my way.

[Atak_Snajpera]

I see a slight jump on the screen every 100 frames when viewing the final merged video.
Probably your decoder is not frame accurate. So instead of 101 frame it returns 102 or 103 or ....
For mpeg2 files use DGindex. For non interlaced h.264 use DGAVCDec. Also use Trim function instead of --seek

[bnshrdr]

Will look into. Thanks so much.

[creamyhorror]

See these old projects:
x264farm: distributed encoding (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=117889)
x264farm-sp - single-pass distributed encoding (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136053)