HandBrake

As do many others, I have a number of computers in the house but the one used for downloading is not my most powerful machine.. A server app/feature for distributed network rendering would be incredibly useful to leverage all the cpu power available in the house and speeding up conversion times enormously! Is this something that would be possible to consider and make reality?

No.

I've had a thread on this one before. What mduell means is the developers are not interested in the challenge. There are distributed cluster encoders out there. "Mediaencoding cluster" http://codergrid.invisionconnect.com/ is the biggest one I can recall.

Just use remote control (e.g. VNC, Remote Desktop, Splashtop, etc) to control the machine you want to encode on if it's too much hassle to physically go there.

I think you have misunderstood the request.

SC

No - since there is zero intention to add distributed transcoding I was suggesting a way to easily use the most powerful machine for the job.

The lack of the intention for the implementation is irrelevant, as this is a feature request. You can request whatever you want, be it the return of a deleted feature, or the implementation of something new.

SC

I also think having a "network rendering" option would be great...but not distributing a single job, that would be difficult. Rather when there are multiple jobs to encode the queue could assign it to another computer. Basically turn the queue into a very basic render manager, where the handbrake software running on remote computers could connect to, copy all the files for a job, process and then copy the result back. I don't think there would need to be any changes to the encoder itself for that.