When a friend of mine recently got an iPod video, he asked me to convert several videos for him as I have a fast dual processor G5 and he does not. So I found out about iSquint, a free iPod video conversion tool. It really works well, but I could not have it make full use of my dual processors; Activity Monitor would read 100% processor use by the app (rather than the 150% to 190% I was hoping for). I ended up trying the developer's 'Pro' video conversion tool, Visual Hub, which is supposed to be able to use Xgrid to convert multiple videos at once. The Xgrid feature appears to be heavily buggy, as I could never get it working -- and neither could anyone in the developer's forums, either.
So I finally came up with this unique solution: make a new folder in the Applications folder and name it iSquint. Within this folder, I put two copies of the iSquint app named iSquint - 1 and iSquint - 2. I can now open both simultaneously in the Dock, set up two queues, and have two video files processed at once. This allows my processor usage to hit a fairly consistent 180%. I can now process a batch of videos nearly twice as fast as I could before. I am assuming this will benefit any dual processor or dual core Mac, which is now every model.
[robg adds: You could probably use this same trick with any video conversion tool.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060717115730772