It wasn't that long ago that reading, processing, and rendering the contents of a single image took a noticeable amount of time. But both hardware and software techniques have gotten significantly faster. What may have made sense many years ago (lots of workers on a frame) may not matter today when a single worker can process a frame or a group of frames more efficiently than the overhead of spinning up a bunch of workers to do the same task.

But where to move that split now? Ultra-low-end CPUs now ship with multiple cores and you can get over 100 easily on high-end systems, system RAM is faster than ever, interconnect moves almost a TB/sec on consumer hardware, GPUs are in everything, and SSDs are now faster than the RAM I grew up with (at least on continuous transfer). Basically the systems of today are entirely different beasts to the ones commonly on the market when FFmpeg was created.

This is tremendous work that requires lots of rethinking about how the workload needs to be defined, scheduled, distributed, tracked, and merged back into a final output. Kudos to the team for being willing to take it on. FFmpeg is one of those "pinnacle of open source" infrastructure components that civilizations are built from.