If your drive is the bottleneck, this will make things worse. If you want to proceed:
You’re already using ffmpeg to get the sequence of frames, correct? You can add the -ss and -t flags to give a start time and a duration. Generate a list of offsets by dividing the length of video by the number of processes you want, and feed them through gnu parallel to your ffmpeg command.
My first thought was similar - there might be some hardware acceleration happening for the jpgs that isn’t for the other formats, resulting in a CPU bottleneck. A modern harddrive over USB3.0 should be capable of hundreds of megabits to several gigabits per second. It seems unlikely that’s your bottleneck (though you can feel free to share stats and correct the assumption if this is incorrect - if your pngs are in the 40 megabyte range, your 3.5 per second would be pretty taxing).
If you are seeing only 1 CPU core at 100%, perhaps you could split the video clip, and process multiple clips in parallel?
it doesn’t unravel the underlying complexity of what it does… these alternative syntaxes tend to make some easy cases easy, but they have no idea what to do with more complicated cases
This can be said of any higher-level language, or API. There is always a cost to abstraction. Binary -> Assembly -> C -> Python. As you go up that chain, many things get easier, but some things become impossible. You always have the option to drop down, though, and these regex tools are no different. Software development, sysops, devops, etc are full of compromises like this.
I currently have a System76 laptop, and sincerely regret my purchase. When I purchased it, the Framework was not out yet - I wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and figured since they controlled the hardware, firmware, and software (Pop!_OS), it would be a good, stable experience. It has not been, and support has generally been poor. I know other people have had better experiences than I have, but personally, I won’t be buying from them again.
I haven’t personally used Purism, but former co-workers spoke really poorly of them. They were trying to buy a big batch for work, and said the build quality was awful. Additionally: https://youtu.be/wKegmu0V75s
In college, in my intro to Java class, I had a program I’d written that I was trying to show someone. Every time I ran it (in Eclipse) it crashed. It had worked earlier, but was then consistently crashing. Looked at the stacktrace, looked at the code… No issues I could spot. After quite a while of poking around, with the file reverted to its original state and still failing, I did a select all, cut, paste (into the same file), and it started working again.