process in background

[Matyas Sustik <debian.list@sustik.com>]

Dear Forum,

I am running a video encoding process for which I would like to use all the
CPU resources which would otherwise be idle.  I do not want this job to get
in the way of any other processes (interactive or something like mythbackend).

I tried using nice -n 19 but the result is noticably slower execution of the
encoding job even when there is nothing else going on.  (About 30-50& slower.)

Is there some other process management tool that could help achieve the goal?
Thanks,
Matyas
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Every hardware eventually breaks.  Every software eventually works.