A method including receiving an input media stream and splitting a video portion of a received portion of the input media stream into input video chunks, while receiving a remaining portion of the input media stream. For each input video chunk of the video portion of the input media stream, the method includes assigning the input video chunk to one or more slave transcoders, splitting the input video chunk into video subchunks, and separately feeding each input video subchunk to each of the one or more slave transcoders. The method includes separately receiving output video subchunks from the one or more slave transcoders. Each output video subchunk respectively corresponds to one of the input video subchunks. The method also includes assembling the output video subchunks into an output video chunk corresponding to the input video chunk and assembling the output video chunks into an output media stream.