This is a program to handle automatic ffmpeg conversions between downloaded videos in order to convert them to desired format.
- Compiler with C++20 support
- Jsoncpp Jsoncpp to parse JSON
- libConfig++ A library to parse config files
- SQlite3 A lite database manager
- FFmpeg Multimedia converter software
- CMake Build system
I usually like to store videos in H265 format in order to save space (specially in 4K films). In order to achieve that, I started by having a text file with the proper FFmpeg command that I usually copy/paste in a terminal modifying it to meet target file specs yet soon I realized that it is a repetitive task and left my little server mostly idle when it finished a conversion.
So finally when I found time, I programmed this little daemon as a hello world application because I never used some of the components I used here, like:
- libConfig++: To read and parse configuration files in an application
- SQlite3: To make use of a little database
- C++17: Features like std::filesystem, std::shared_ptr, std::unique_ptr and std::optional which I never used (and they are great!)
So once I started, this quickly became addictive and now that it is finished I'm very glad this works!
In order to compile it download and unpack the source code to a folder and run cmake <source_code_folder> to configure, make to compile and finally make install (remember to use sudo or similar to get root privileges for install).
There are some codecs to use which need to be enabled when running configure stage, this are the optional codecs to be supported (please make sure your FFmpeg support those codecs before enabling it, otherwise your files will not be converted to those) along with the CMake options to enable them:
- -DENABLE_HEVC=ON: Enable libx265 codec for H.265 content
- -DENABLE_AAC=ON: Enable the Advanced Audio Codec
- -DENABLE_FDKAAC=ON: Enable the Advanced Audio Codec via Fraunhoffer encoder (not GPL!)
- -DENABLE_AC3=ON: Enable Dolby's AC-3 codec
- -DENABLE_EAC3=ON: Enable Dolby's Enhanced AC-3 codec
- -DENABLE_OPUS=ON: Enable Opus codec via libopus encoder
It is possible that support for more codecs come in the future!
First of all, check file /etc/conf.d/StormByte-videoconvert.conf file and edit it according to your needs and folders
Just call StormByte-videoconvert --add <film_relative_path> remembering that path should be relative to input path you set in config and follow on screen instructions.
If daemon have not been started yet, you can start it via /etc/init.d/StormByte-videoconvert start command or manually by StormByte-videoconvert --daemon, if it does not start successfully will print error message and if it does will output to logfile set in config.
The daemon will query database every sleep configured seconds and if it finds a film for convert it will attempt to do that, working temporarily in work directory and finally storing its result (if successful) in output directory.
The program comes with a mini-help that can be invoked any time by running StormByte-videoconvert --help command.