[steelbrain]

> streaming it over the interwebs isn't the issue

The hope is that you stream over LAN not the interwebs!

> I always get a speedup from moving the files off my external hard-drive

Based on your description, it does seem like your ffmpeg may be IO limited

[matsemann]

Ah, yeah, so this is probably for more professional workflows where you have a workhorse somewhere. Perhaps even in the cloud as long as the files are close by as well? My use case would be more "my computer sucks, so would be nice to do it on a beefy cloud computer", but of course no time is saved when just reading my files is slow, heh.