FFmpeg, while equalling or surpassing the speed of nearly all other codec implementations on a single CPU core, currently only has limited and specific support for multithreading. I will implement a frame-level multithreading system, which can efficiently speed up all uses of libavcodec. This will be based on the successful implementation in the x264 encoder[1], extended to support decoding and whatever synchronization will be required.

[1] http://akuvian.org/src/x264/sliceless_threads.txt, http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442&pgno=0