The primary focus of MPEG encoding algorithms is 1) To create fast and efficient motion vector search techniques and 2) To find "good" encoding parameters that provide a balance of encoding speed, compression and quality. The Berkeley encoder accelerates the process by parallelizing in the temporal direction. The overall organization of the encoder is shown in Figure 2. The Master server is the overall coordinator. It allocates groups of frames to the Slave servers for encoding. The sharing of the files is achieved best, if the directories containing the video files are NFS mounted and accessible uniformly to all processors (alternatively they can be sent out though sockets by the Master). The various activities are managed by inter process communication through sockets.