Hi Alex,
I've looked at the LAME encoder and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any built in commands to adjust its own process priority class. Regardless of this, the responsibility for setting priority should not fall upon LAME itself but the program that uses it no? I believe MediaCentre should be the one responsble for setting this value and I guess I'm not sure why such an easy option was never incorporated.
Any developers care to shed some light on this? As an example, if LAME were called from the command line you could use "START /BELOWNORMAL LAME.EXE [LAME Parameters]" to set it to run in BelowNormal priority. This would not slow down encoding one bit except when system resources were required for a more important function... like moving the mouse around
If the computer were idle while this was running, the encoder would still use all available CPU resources.
Thanks for the suggestion on a possible solution, I kind of read it as.. "MediaCentre wasn't designed to control encoding priority so why not just buy another computer and dedicate it to MediaCentre". The logic seems a little faulty here