A multiple bitrate (MBR) video encoding management tool utilizes available processing units for parallel MBR video encoding. For example, instead of focusing only on multi-threading of encoding tasks for a single picture or group of pictures (GOP), the management tool parallelizes the encoding of multiple GOPs between different processing units and/or different computing systems. With this parallel MBR video encoding architecture, different GOPs can be encoded in parallel. To facilitate such parallel encoding, data dependencies between GOPs are removed. The management tool can adjust the number of GOPs to encode in parallel on a computing system so as to favor parallelism of encoding for different GOPs at the expense of parallelism of encoding inside a GOP, or vice versa, and thereby set a suitable balance between encoding latency and throughput.