By the way, would it be possible to allow DCP-o-Matic find encoding servers outside its own LAN?
With servers like Pi2 powered with a few watts, this would allow us to settle some kind of worldwide distributed encoding farm.

You need Gigabit-throuput to make this viable.

I thought about cloud-based encoding before (and actually Carl tested it as well a while ago with digital ocean). The problem is, you need to supply source footage and receive compressed footage at a very high speed. Most people will not have the necessary internet-connection to make this work (and upstream will usually be even slower).

It's certainly interesting to hire a very fast compute machine in the cloud for 2US$ per hour and be impressed by the encoding speed for a short demo snippet - but then to upload e.g. a 25GByte MKV and receive back 120Gigabyte of DCP - that's a different thing. Upload and download will take much longer than local encoding on 'decent' hardware.

- Carsten