So, you may be one of those lucky ones having more than one MAC at your disposal. You may even have Compressor installed. This handy application comes with Final Cut Pro and it allows you to convert your movies into all sorts of formats using batch processing. To make things more interesting, Apple has thrown in Qmaster. This great tool allows you to build clusters. That's right! Why not put those CPU cycles inside your mighty Macs on your network to good use?
According to our good friends at Apple, that's a piece of cake. Thanks to quick cluster, you can set a cluster up in just about no time at all. This blog isn't going to tell you how to do it. Because I assume that you've already done it only to find out that it doesn't work properly. Then you did what everybody else would do. You went on to Google to search for the answer. Which is most likely why you ended up here... So lets cut to the chase.
You built your quick cluster, you started the services and now you're trying to submit a batch job. The only thing that happens afterwards is that Compressor seems to be hanging. The beach ball is spinning and nothing else is happening. After a few seconds or even minutes, you will get an error message saying something like "ContentAgent server not found". No matter what you do, no matter how many times you reinstall Compressor, the error just keeps popping up.
Here's why:
You've enabled "Back to my Mac" in your mobile me preference panel. That's right... It's got nothing to do with Compressor, Qmaster or FCP or anything else. The only reason why it doesn't work is because of this little, most annoying setting. Go figure... It took me several days to solve that one.
Now I'm happily using Compressor to convert all my movies to Apple TV, iPhone and Touch in one go and boy, how great is it to use a cluster! Things are just flying! I have to say it's most impressive to see an 8core MacPro and a 4core G5 PowerMac hard at work. I even throw in my Macbook Pro to spice things up a bit!