DirectShow Editing Services on multiple machines in parallel?

Question

Is it in any way possible to process at least 1 DShow video project on multiple machines in parallel at the same time for faster rendering or just for fun?

In any language? With help of any program?

Answer 1

The short answer is yes, but it's not a very practical solution

Lets say you did manage to create a system that broke a video up across machines for distributed decoding. You first would have to be careful on how you did "break up" the video. You must always start at keyframe and ending right before the next keyframe. Next you would have to decode your clip. Once decoded, the decoded data must be transfered to the computer rendering the video. An uncompressed 1080p @ 30 FPS stream would be ~182 megaBYTES/s, which is more than a gigabit connection can handle.

You are better off decoding over multiple cores and the GPU.