I think that if you're operating at the scale of Google using a single-threaded ffmpeg will finish your jobs in less time. If you have a queue of 100k videos t

I think that if you're operating at the scale of Google using a single-threaded ffmpeg will finish your jobs in less time. If you have a queue of 100k videos to process and a cluster of 100 cores, assigning a video to each core as it becomes available is the most efficient way to process them, because your skipping the thread joining time. Anytime there is a queue of jobs, assigning the next job in the queue to the next free core is always going to be faster than assigning the next job to multiple cores.