> cool idea. can you elaborate on IO and how the ffmpeg-server reads blocks from the client? that would seem to be a big blocker

ffmpeg-server runs a patched version of ffmpeg locally, ffmpeg requests to read some chunks (ie give me video.mp4) through our patched filesystem (https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/blob/main/fio/f...), which gets sent over the same socket that the client established, client receives the request, does the file operations locally and sends the results back over the socket to the server, and server then sends them to ffmpeg.

ffmpeg has no idea its not interacting with a local file system