I was refering to FFMPEG, not the various ruby packages he used. All he really did was wrap FFMPEG with a script that called it with predefined arguments and kick it off to S3. He could have seen the same dramatic improvement with a handful of lines of bash.

Probably worth noteing that he doesn't even seem to know how his own script works. He was puzzled that it was burning all of his CPUs without him having to make it do that, when that is exactly the behavior you would expect.