In the lead-up to today’s grand experiment, yesterday I was conducting some preliminary experiments using Xgrid.
I’ve got a lot of video I’ve recorded digitally that I would now like to have in an iTunes-friendly H.264. VisualHub, which is the program I generally use for conversion does a nice job of it. Further, it does it rather fast (at least on my MacBook), rendering down 30 minutes of video in around 20 minutes.
One of the things that’s always intrigued me about VisualHub is that it is Xgrid-enabled. Xgrid is a nifty little Apple technology that clusters OSX computers into a distributed computing platform. I’ve completely ignored this feature of VisualHub because everybody knows you need an OSX Server to control an Xgrid cluster, don’t they?
Turns out, no. Any OSX box has everything you need to run an Xgrid controller. Unlike OSX Server, though, you have to do it through a command line… or, in this case, VisualHub will activate the controller for you.
With a little tinkering, I had VisualHub rendering down H.264 videos on 6 processors simultaneously.
Unfortunately, VisualHub doesn’t break the jobs down into small components, and simply doles out each file’s render as a separate Xgrid task. (Probably because VisualHub uses FFMPEG for rendering and that’s not Xgrid aware) which means you have to wait for all files in the batch to be done before you see the results for any of them.
Still, it’s making considerably shorter work of the daunting task of converting all those files into iTunes.
If you have a dual-processor Mac, the Xgrid encoding even significantly improves multiple renders on a single machine as it allocate two jobs simultaneously, one to each processor – bringing CPU usage on my Macbook up to about 195% for the duration of the renders.
If you’re interested in exploring Xgrid, here are two terribly useful tools:
Xgrid Admin. This is from Apple and is part of Server Admin tools. Generally these tools are for managing an OSX Server, but can be installed on a regular OSX machine for remote management. Xgrid Admin is just one of the pieces and will monitor any Xgrid controller on your network, including the local machine.
XgridLite from edbaskerville.com. The Xgrid controller is on every OSX box, but who wants to monkey around with the command line? XgridLite is a simple plug-in for System Preferences to control the Xgrid animal that lurks just beneath Tiger’s skin.
So, why do I want all my videos to be in iTunes all of a sudden?
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