The current options that Video Monkey feeds to ffmpeg use the default single thread. Fortunately Video Monkey is setup in a rather clever way, and we are able change the commands used easily.

To use all of your CPU cores:

- Open your applications folder, right click on Video Monkey, select “Show Package Contents”
- a new finder window appears, open “Contents” and then “Resources”
- open “commands.xml” in your favorite text editor
- find the section “<device_group title=”iTunes”>”
- go down a few more lines to get to the element “<command id=”ffmpeg_options”>”

This is the command line that is executed when you encode a video usting any of the devices that are under the “iTunes” group in the UI.
On the end of that list of command line parameters add “-threads 2″. Use the number of CPU cores you have.

Your finished product should look something like this:

<command id=”ffmpeg_options”>
-vcodec $ffmpeg_vcodec -b $output_video_bitrate -s $(output_video_width)x$(output_video_height)
-aspect $(output_video_width):$(output_video_height) -r $(output_video_frame_rate)
-acodec $ffmpeg_acodec -ab $output_audio_bitrate -ar $output_audio_sample_rate -ac $output_audio_channels
-threads 2
</command>

Grab a new video to encode, and watch your CPU meter.

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