Supporting 2-pass Parallel Encoding with x264 and ffmpeg

If you’re doing several encodes of a single input file (to encode several different sizes / bitrate combinations) in parallel with x264, you’re going to have a problem. The first pass will create three files with information about the file for the second pass, and you’re unable to change this file name into something better. This seems to be a problem for quite a lot of people according to a Google-search for the issue, and none seems to have any proper solution.

I have one. Well, probably not a proper solution, but at least it works! The trick is to realize that ffmpeg/x264 creates these files in the current working directory. To run several encodings in parallel, you’ll simply have to give each encoding process it’s own directory, and then use absolute paths to the source and destination file (and any other paths). Let it create the files there and clean up and delete the directories afterwards.

I’ve included some example code from PHP in regards to how you could solve something like this. I simply use the output file name as the directory name here, and create the directory in the system temp directory.

$tempDir = sys_get_temp_dir() . '/' . $outputFilename);
mkdir($tempDir, 0700, true);
chdir($tempDir);

After doing the encode, we’ll have to clean up. The three files that ffmpeg/x264 creates are ffmpeg2pass-0.log, x264_2pass.log and x264_2pass.log.mbtree.

unlink($tempDir . '/ffmpeg2pass-0.log');
unlink($tempDir . '/x264_2pass.log');
unlink($tempDir . '/x264_2pass.log.mbtree');
rmdir($tempDir);

And that should hopefully solve it!