With folks using Media Mover to transcode larger and larger video files, cron time outs have become somewhat of a problem as Drupal waits for FFmpeg to complete its processing. With Media Mover one, configurations are run from cron by default (not required, but out of the box) which means that cron runs as long as the Media Mover configuration takes. While it is possible to limit cron runs, the reality of transcoding a gigabyte file is that it takes time regardless of how much horsepower you can throw at it. Media Mover one was setup to be friendly to multi-machine systems, but the system left some things to be desired.
Now that Drupal Queue has been backported from Drupal 7 to Drupal 6, the queue system can be leveraged by Media Mover 2 to reduce the impact of multiple large jobs running at once. This means that cron timeouts and locks are less of a risk if you install the Drupal Queue module while degrading gracefully to Drupal's standard cron.
