I have a php web page running on a low powered web server (home use only) that writes FFMPEG commands to a file for later processing by a more powerfull machine. It possible to write a shell script, to run on the more powerfull machine, that will read the first line of the queue (all relivant files are available on an samba share), remove that line from the file, execute it and repeat until the file is empty. I could then run this on multiple computers to encode at the same time (I have potentially a couple of thousand files to encode).All machines are running on Current Debian.

Extract forom Queue File(with file paths removed)

Path_to_FFMPEG -threads 2 -i Path_to_uploaded_CDG -i Path_To_Uploaded_MP3 -f webm -b:v -acodec libvorbis -vcodec libvpx -preset slower -qp 0 -sws_flags print_info+neighbor -s 640x480 -r 30 -y Target_File_For_Output_webm
/home/richard/www/upload/ffmpeg -threads 2 -i Path_to_uploaded_CDG -i Path_to_uploaded_MP3 -f webm -b:v -acodec libvorbis -vcodec libvpx -preset slower -qp 0 -sws_flags print_info+neighbor -s 640x480 -r 30 -y Target_File_For_Output_webm

It's certainly possible, but it might require some custom processing. Also, you'll have to be careful that both systems don't try to update the file at once. I'm not sure how well CIFS handles file locking, so that might be an issue.

You might want to look at free distributed queuing systems such as TORQUE, Open Grid Engine, or SLURM. They're not quite designed for your use case, but they could be used. I think most big render farms use DrQueue, so that one might be worth checking out too, but I have no personal experience with it.

Thanks btmiller I'll check out those queuing systems.
To avoid the possible issue of accessing a file by 2 machines at once I could flip the whole thing around a bit. If the server pinged a list if possible IP's and from that created a list of active machines, it could iterate through them and using ssh, first test the client machines 5 min average CPU load using upstart if it is less than say 80% it would send the FFMPEG command and then move onto the next ip address, if all client machines are over 80% load wait 60 sec and repeat.
It would mean setting up preshared keys which I've never done but there are countless tutorials on line.