the original poster's project also requires shared filesystem. as for bash-ssh solution, you don't need shared FS, if you don't need intermediate results. you

the original poster's project also requires shared filesystem. as for bash-ssh solution, you don't need shared FS, if you don't need intermediate results. you can use SCP to get the final result after transcoding has finished. something like: alias ffmpeg-over-ip='ssh myserver "ffmpeg \"\$@\" /tmp/output/"' alias download-results='scp myserver:/tmp/output/*.* .' ffmpeg-over-ip <args> && download-results my meta point being is, before engineering something with programming language, and handrolling webservers, with auth, and workers - just try to implement your system with bash scripts. Martin Klepmann created an entire database using just bash aliases in his book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"