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Show HN: FFmpeg-over-IP – Connect to remote FFmpeg servers

147 points by steelbrain 2y ago

Dear HN, I’m excited to show case a personal project. It has helped me quite a bit with my home lab, I hope it can help you with yours too! ffmpeg-over-ip has two components, a server and a client. You can run the server in an environment with access to a GPU and a locally installed version of ffmpeg, the client only needs network access to the server and no GPU or ffmpeg locally. Both and client and the server need a shared filesystem for this to work (so the server can write output to it, and client can read from it). In my usecase, smb works well if your (GPU) server is a windows machine, nfs works really well for linux setups. This utility can be useful in a number of scenarios: - You find passing through a (v)GPU to your virtual machines complicated - You want to use the same GPU for ffmpeg in multiple virtual machines - Your server has a weak GPU so you want to use the GPU from your gaming machine - Your GPU drivers in one OS are not as good as another (AMD RX6400 never worked for me in linux, but did so in windows) I’ve posted some instructions in the Github package README, please let me know if they are unclear in any way and I’ll try to help! Here's the link: https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip

steelbrain 2y ago
The latest release[1] on Github should have binaries combinations for almost everybody here. If you don't find a binary for your environment, you can probably just run the javascript files and it'll be fine. If you are wondering why the binaries are so large, it's because they are packaged-up node.js binaries. I tried to learn a compile-to-native language to rewrite this in so you won't have to download such bloated binaries but didn't get far. I learned Swift and still have a WIP branch up for it[2]. I gave up after learning that there's no well maintained windows http server for swift. I'm currently on my journey to learn Rust. So maybe one day when I do, you'll see the binary sizes drop. [1]:https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/releases/tag/v3.0.0 https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/releases/tag/v3... [2]:https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/tree/swift-lang https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/tree/swift-lang
- Cyph0n 2y ago
  Go would be a good fit for this kind of application. But Rust is a great choice too. Keep up the good work!
- chrisldgk 2y ago
  You might be able to switch to Bun or Deno with relatively little effort and create binaries that are probably a lot smaller (and maybe also faster) with each of their compile commands [1][2]. In the end I do also believe that a compiled language like Swift, Rust or Go might be a better fit though. [1] https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/compiler/ https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/compiler/ [2] https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables
  - steelbrain 2y ago
    FWIW, `bun` produced larger output files ~/P/s/ffmpeg-over-ip bun build ./src/client.ts --compile --minify --sourcemap --bytecode --outfile ffmpeg-over-ip-client ; ls -lah | grep ffmpeg-over-ip-client [6ms] minify -90.92 KB (estimate) [3ms] bundle 6 modules [44ms] compile ffmpeg-over-ip-client -rwxrwxrwx 1 steelbrain staff 56M Oct 6 16:53 ffmpeg-over-ip-client and `deno` produced even bigger outputs ~/P/s/ffmpeg-over-ip deno compile --allow-read --allow-net ./lib/client.js ; ls -lah | grep client Compile file:///Users/steelbrain/Projects/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/lib/client.js to client -rwxr-xr-x 1 steelbrain staff 65M Oct 6 16:56 client
steelbrain 2y ago
Here[1] is the original HN comment that inspired me to do a Show HN :) [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205253
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Thank you for the Show HN!
steelbrain 2y ago
There is an existing solution in the community called rffmpeg[1] but that did not work for me. It seems too heavy weight for what I was trying to do. It requires access to sudo, global configuration files (/etc/) and most importantly, this, which is a deal-breaker for me: > Note that if hardware acceleration is configured in the calling application, the exact same hardware acceleration modes must be available on all configured hosts, and, for fallback to work, the local host as well, or the ffmpeg commands will fail. I wanted to mix and match windows and linux, and it was clear rffmpeg wasn't going to work for me. One plus rffmpeg does have is that it supports multiple target hosts, so it's useful if you want some load balancing action. Although you could do the same with ffmpeg-over-ip, just selecting the servers dynamically but rffmpeg does make it easier out of the box. [1]:https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg
tetrisgm 2y ago
Sounds super interesting. Maybe the people currently using Tdarr would prefer something like this. I could also imagine something like Plex or Jellyfin making use of this tech and offloading transcoding. Hope this takes off.
- steelbrain 2y ago
  Thanks! I developed this primarily for plex & jellyfin after struggling with Tdarr myself. For people running plex/jellyfin in containers, it's as simple as mounting the client binary at the ffmpeg path (using docker -v) and adding the config somewhere accessible (also using docker -v? lots of options here).
  - tetrisgm 2y ago
    Maybe you could make guides and post it on the various synology and self hosting subreddits. I could see this get traction
  - blue_cookeh 2y ago
    Does this work well with Plex and if so, what binary are you replacing? Last I looked they used a customised fork of ffmpeg which meant replacing it was more awkward. It would be a nice way to avoid passing a GPU through to a virtual machine.
ptspts 2y ago
What problem does it solve? How to use it? Do you have example commands? How is video data transferred between the client and the server? Would it be possible to connect with SSH to a Linux server, using SFTP with FUSE or Samba with port forwarding for file sharing? This way the server could be zero-configuration (except that ffmpeg has to be installed, but the executable can also be transferred over SSH).
- steelbrain 2y ago
  > What problem does it solve? For different people it's going to solve different problems. For me, most recently, I wanted to use the powerful GPU in my gaming machine for transcoding in my plex server with an integrated GPU. > How to use it? Do you have example commands? The Github repository should have instructions on how to use. The client usage (once you setup the configuration) is the same as ffmpeg, so anything ffmpeg ... becomes ffmpeg-over-ip-client ... -- you need a server running on the machine with the GPU and then client anywhere network-accessible. > How is video data transferred between the client and the server? The server and client only transfer commands, stdout/err etc. The data of the transcoded files themselves is transferred over the network mount. The README of the repository has more details here but essentially you'll want a shared filesystem between the two. > Would it be possible to connect with SSH to a Linux server, using SFTP with FUSE or Samba with port forwarding for file sharing? This way the server could be zero-configuration (except that ffmpeg has to be installed, but the executable can also be transferred over SSH). Configuration should be pretty straight forward but let me know if you try it and find it difficult. A template configuration file is provided and you can edit your way out of it. You can absolutely do this with port forwarding even over the internet, provided the file system mount over the network can keep up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
VWWHFSfQ 2y ago
I used to use dvd::rip [1] (written in perl) that was sort of a similar concept. Deploy transcode jobs onto a cluster of servers accessing a shared filesystem (nfs, smb, etc.). worked really well. I think it used gstreamer though. I set up a homelab of a bunch of pentium 3s that I salvaged from a PC recycler behind my work. They just had a big pile of obsolete computers covered by a tarp. I grabbed a few chassis with working motherboards, and then scrounged around for the best intel CPUs I could find. and memory sticks. I put together a fun little DVD-ripping factory with those machines. [1] https://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/ https://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/
slt2021 2y ago
this is really not much different from ssh-ing to your GPU server and running ffmpeg. Very roundabout way to execute remote bash command on a server I dont meant to discourage you, but it is possible to replace your entire repo with a simple bash alias: alias ffmpeg-over-ip='ssh myserver "ffmpeg \"\$@\""'
- steelbrain 2y ago
  This comment gave me flashbacks to another comment I read a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 If your usecase is solved by an alias, that's really good! I am glad you can use an alias. My usecase required a bit more so I wrote this utility and am sharing it with my peers
  - slt2021 2y ago
    Dropbox had a cutting edge file synchronization algorithm, they solved a problem of large file sync over unreliable network. There was a clear engineering IP they developed. (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...) I looked over your source code and just saw a bash wrapper with webserver, so no significant IP. Any potential innovations: like possible distributed transcoding, sharding/partitioning transcoding pipeline to speed-up are missing. its just a bash wrapper, thats why I commented about bash alias. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but I was honestly looking for some innovation about ffmpeg
    - steelbrain 2y ago
      This was not meant to offend. I appreciate you explaining your message further. There's no significant IP in this utility, it's something I wrote for a usecase and it works well for that usecase. I ran the server side on a windows machine, and I did not want to setup a full blown ssh server and expose it over the network for this usecase. Another thing was logging. The way logging is currently setup really hits the sweet spot for debugability for me. Lastly it's the rewrites. I've used the config to rewrite incoming codecs to something the machine supports. This is a purpose built utility that does one job and IMO does it fairly well. It's definitely not as complex as Dropbox but also not as simple as an ssh alias. I appreciate you sharing the alias code (not just the comment) so if some of our peers have usecases that could be solved by it, they are welcome to use that as well!
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Not to steal thunder (nice! Well done!) but also this reminded me to go check in on https://kyber.media https://kyber.media (currently a landing page), a ffmpeg streaming project from me ffmmpeg himself (I think?) Jean-Baptiste Kempf. He had a LinkedIn update two weeks ago, mentioning the effort! Yay! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbkempf_playruo-the-worlds-first-click-and-play-activity-7241806921547005952-wruW https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbkempf_playruo-the-worlds-fi... Submission from 6 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc
- steelbrain 2y ago
  Very cool! Thank you for sharing!
qwertox 2y ago
IDK, this lacks a lot of examples and explaining what exactly it is for. Is it for remote transcoding only? Because if so, the word transcoding does not appear neither in this Show HN nor in the GitHub README. And I can't think of any other use for this than to perform hardware-assisted transcoding on a remote machine. Apparently it has nothing to do with OpenGL or CUDA, which are the primary uses for a GPU. And ffmpeg itself has more use cases than just transcoding files.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I question for why not just SSH into the more powerful computer to run the ffmpeg command like a normal person. Why would you need to install a server and client? There are plenty of binaries available for ffmpeg to avoid compiling from source difficulties. Solutions like these are the things that just make me tilt my head and make the clueless "huh?" sound.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    Because OpenSSH on Windows is a shitshow. Mounted SMB shares can’t be accessed because they’re tied to login sessions, and you can’t mount them from within an SSH session (IIRC in theory you can, but in practice it never worked for me).[1] Which means ffmpeg is practically useless if you need input that you can’t (e.g. livestream) or don’t want to copy in advance, or need output in realtime. At least that’s why I built something similar in Go for myself. Before anyone mentions WSL: it either didn’t support GPU passthrough or was very difficult to configure when I set this up a few years ago, don’t know about current status. And you can’t call Windows executables from WSL when you SSH into it. [1] https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/139 https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/139
    - dylan604 2y ago
      there are other ways to mount drives. you can even mount drives on a PC like normal computers with a "/" mount point instead of ridiculous C:\ stuff that does not require WSL. you can use a URI as an input to ffmpeg which allows for not needing access to a C:\. pretty much any decent NAS will allow access via URI instead of drive letter mounts. if something was learned during the building of the server/client app, then great if that's why it was done. but it's only one of the 99 ways of skinning the cat, and probably not even close to the best one.
NavinF 2y ago
> need a shared filesystem for this to work Oh oof. I thought removing that requirement would be the whole point of something named "FFmpeg-over-IP". Shared filesystem usually involves full trust between machines, bad network error handling, and setting things up by hand (different config on every distro)
- steelbrain 2y ago
  I hear you. If your usecase doesn't require live streaming of converted file, a sibling comment may fit the usecase: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41745593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41745593
  - NavinF 2y ago
    Ah unfortunately my use case is similar to yours: Use Windows desktop to transcode files stored on a Linux NAS. My files are ~100GB so encoding multiple files in parallel would waste a lot of space and unnecessarily burn write cycles
    - steelbrain 2y ago
      FWIW, you can run an smb server from within a docker container (on the linux side). I forget which one I used but it makes the setup painless and you can configure different auth strategies as well. Network errors (little bit of packet loss) are generally handled by the underlying OS, and in case of windows, it can use multiple network paths simultaneously to give you the aggregate bandwidth.
      - linuxdude314 2y ago
        You typically don’t even have to go to that length. This is usually supported out of the box. No idea what problem this is trying to solve. Just seems like the user wasn’t familiar enough with how to use a NAS.
        2y ago
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
I can encode faster than I can upload. Might be useful if you have gigabit to a computer more powerful than one in your home.
seltzered_ 2y ago
Can this possibly be helpful for second-screen (aka extended display) scenarios between a PC and a tablet/phone? Thinking of https://tuxphones.com/howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display-for-linux/ https://tuxphones.com/howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display... -> https://gitlab.com/tuxphones/side-displays https://gitlab.com/tuxphones/side-displays but for those running android or ios
LeoPanthera 2y ago
As other comments have suggested it's difficult to imagine that this has a lot of advantages to simply using pipes over ssh. And pipes don't need a shared filesystem either. I suppose ssh would be tricky if you're combining multiple input files.
- _hyn3 2y ago
  xargs
  - LeoPanthera 2y ago
    That doesn't help send multiple files over a single pipe. You can't just cat them.
    - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
      You can `tar` them though :)
      - LeoPanthera 2y ago
        That's true, although that requires storage on the other end. Not too much of a problem in most cases, perhaps. But with single input, single output, you can just do: ssh destination "ffmpeg -switches" <infile >outfile
        _hyn3 2y ago
        you can xargs your files and even parallelize (read the xargs man page) before you ssh.
        bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        Great point! Something like this could work, modulo ffmpeg arguments which I didn't check. find . -name '*.mkv' \ -exec bash -c \ "ssh server ffmpeg < {} > {}.transcoded.mp4" \;
wwalexander 2y ago
How does this compare with the built-in ffserver? https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ffserver https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ffserver
- qwertox 2y ago
  > Warning: ffserver has been removed on 2018-01-06.
  - wwalexander 2y ago
    Whoops, bit of banner blindness there, thank you for the heads-up!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maxlin 2y ago
I wrote something similar to this. Instead of requiring a shared network drive, dependent files are automatically detected and transferred over with HTTP, and as an advanced feature, it splits the video to chunks to allow 20x+ encode speeds, concurrently utilizing multiple machines to encode a single input file and utilizing NVENC. Video is then concatenated together and API for that mode is identical. Wrote it in C# and it runs both on Windows and Linux. The original need for this actually was to accelerate encodes a system I run on a cloud VM needs when I have either my desktop or laptop available, who then work as encode slaves and pick up jobs, run them and send the output files back. If no slaves are available, the system falls back to local CPU encode. Later I ended up using this using a local Windows server machine as the "client" the slaves also connect to to ask for jobs (actually the system runs inside a Unity project in that case because C# is awesome). Probably a bit of a rare problem I hit with this is that different NVENC generations generate different enough bitstreams that they can't be concatenated together. From my pool of machines I found out only my RTX 2070 and RTX 3080 Mobile are compatible. GTX 970 and Quadro P5000 that I had laying around both were incompatible with that pool and with each other. Interestingly I found no similar software to the chunked encoding in my system, but am chalking it up on me not searching hard enough or these being integrated deep in to commercial/private systems. It would make sense that big players like YouTube have something like this in place, as reducing latency for individual upload transcodes finishing is beneficial instead of limiting their speed to a single hardware encoding / software encoding node. It's the same amount of processing that needs to be done in the end anyway, so might as well use 10 nodes to complete single jobs really quickly one after another
mdrzn 2y ago
"Your server has a weak GPU so you want to use the GPU from your gaming machine" would be my usecase for this, but it seems overly complicated, having to setup a shared filesystem. I have a VPS on OVH which uses ffmpeg to convert mp3 files from 320kbps to 128kbps, it runs at 32x real speed on the server, but it could run 100x faster on my desktop pc. If there was an easy way to let the VPS "run" ffmpeg from my machine, that'd be great.
- 9dev 2y ago
  Use Tailscale (or really just WireGuard) to connect the server to your desktop, run it using this tool or ssh?
- sulandor 2y ago
  what is stopping you from taking the ovh-vps out of the equation?
mrkramer 2y ago
I was exploring running FFmpeg in the cloud and I stumbled upon this: https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/ https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/ What would be great is FFmpeg in the cloud with GUI for easier use.

147 points by steelbrain 2y ago

steelbrain 2y ago

The latest release[1] on Github should have binaries combinations for almost everybody here. If you don't find a binary for your environment, you can probably just run the javascript files and it'll be fine. If you are wondering why the binaries are so large, it's because they are packaged-up node.js binaries. I tried to learn a compile-to-native language to rewrite this in so you won't have to download such bloated binaries but didn't get far. I learned Swift and still have a WIP branch up for it[2]. I gave up after learning that there's no well maintained windows http server for swift. I'm currently on my journey to learn Rust. So maybe one day when I do, you'll see the binary sizes drop. [1]:https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/releases/tag/v3.0.0 https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/releases/tag/v3... [2]:https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/tree/swift-lang https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/tree/swift-lang

Cyph0n 2y ago
Go would be a good fit for this kind of application. But Rust is a great choice too. Keep up the good work!
chrisldgk 2y ago
You might be able to switch to Bun or Deno with relatively little effort and create binaries that are probably a lot smaller (and maybe also faster) with each of their compile commands [1][2]. In the end I do also believe that a compiled language like Swift, Rust or Go might be a better fit though. [1] https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/compiler/ https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/compiler/ [2] https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables
- steelbrain 2y ago
  FWIW, `bun` produced larger output files ~/P/s/ffmpeg-over-ip bun build ./src/client.ts --compile --minify --sourcemap --bytecode --outfile ffmpeg-over-ip-client ; ls -lah | grep ffmpeg-over-ip-client [6ms] minify -90.92 KB (estimate) [3ms] bundle 6 modules [44ms] compile ffmpeg-over-ip-client -rwxrwxrwx 1 steelbrain staff 56M Oct 6 16:53 ffmpeg-over-ip-client and `deno` produced even bigger outputs ~/P/s/ffmpeg-over-ip deno compile --allow-read --allow-net ./lib/client.js ; ls -lah | grep client Compile file:///Users/steelbrain/Projects/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/lib/client.js to client -rwxr-xr-x 1 steelbrain staff 65M Oct 6 16:56 client

steelbrain 2y ago

Here[1] is the original HN comment that inspired me to do a Show HN :) [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205253

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Thank you for the Show HN!

steelbrain 2y ago

There is an existing solution in the community called rffmpeg[1] but that did not work for me. It seems too heavy weight for what I was trying to do. It requires access to sudo, global configuration files (/etc/) and most importantly, this, which is a deal-breaker for me: > Note that if hardware acceleration is configured in the calling application, the exact same hardware acceleration modes must be available on all configured hosts, and, for fallback to work, the local host as well, or the ffmpeg commands will fail. I wanted to mix and match windows and linux, and it was clear rffmpeg wasn't going to work for me. One plus rffmpeg does have is that it supports multiple target hosts, so it's useful if you want some load balancing action. Although you could do the same with ffmpeg-over-ip, just selecting the servers dynamically but rffmpeg does make it easier out of the box. [1]:https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg

tetrisgm 2y ago

Sounds super interesting. Maybe the people currently using Tdarr would prefer something like this. I could also imagine something like Plex or Jellyfin making use of this tech and offloading transcoding. Hope this takes off.

steelbrain 2y ago
Thanks! I developed this primarily for plex & jellyfin after struggling with Tdarr myself. For people running plex/jellyfin in containers, it's as simple as mounting the client binary at the ffmpeg path (using docker -v) and adding the config somewhere accessible (also using docker -v? lots of options here).
- tetrisgm 2y ago
  Maybe you could make guides and post it on the various synology and self hosting subreddits. I could see this get traction
- blue_cookeh 2y ago
  Does this work well with Plex and if so, what binary are you replacing? Last I looked they used a customised fork of ffmpeg which meant replacing it was more awkward. It would be a nice way to avoid passing a GPU through to a virtual machine.

ptspts 2y ago

What problem does it solve? How to use it? Do you have example commands? How is video data transferred between the client and the server? Would it be possible to connect with SSH to a Linux server, using SFTP with FUSE or Samba with port forwarding for file sharing? This way the server could be zero-configuration (except that ffmpeg has to be installed, but the executable can also be transferred over SSH).

steelbrain 2y ago
> What problem does it solve? For different people it's going to solve different problems. For me, most recently, I wanted to use the powerful GPU in my gaming machine for transcoding in my plex server with an integrated GPU. > How to use it? Do you have example commands? The Github repository should have instructions on how to use. The client usage (once you setup the configuration) is the same as ffmpeg, so anything ffmpeg ... becomes ffmpeg-over-ip-client ... -- you need a server running on the machine with the GPU and then client anywhere network-accessible. > How is video data transferred between the client and the server? The server and client only transfer commands, stdout/err etc. The data of the transcoded files themselves is transferred over the network mount. The README of the repository has more details here but essentially you'll want a shared filesystem between the two. > Would it be possible to connect with SSH to a Linux server, using SFTP with FUSE or Samba with port forwarding for file sharing? This way the server could be zero-configuration (except that ffmpeg has to be installed, but the executable can also be transferred over SSH). Configuration should be pretty straight forward but let me know if you try it and find it difficult. A template configuration file is provided and you can edit your way out of it. You can absolutely do this with port forwarding even over the internet, provided the file system mount over the network can keep up.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

VWWHFSfQ 2y ago

I used to use dvd::rip [1] (written in perl) that was sort of a similar concept. Deploy transcode jobs onto a cluster of servers accessing a shared filesystem (nfs, smb, etc.). worked really well. I think it used gstreamer though. I set up a homelab of a bunch of pentium 3s that I salvaged from a PC recycler behind my work. They just had a big pile of obsolete computers covered by a tarp. I grabbed a few chassis with working motherboards, and then scrounged around for the best intel CPUs I could find. and memory sticks. I put together a fun little DVD-ripping factory with those machines. [1] https://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/ https://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/

slt2021 2y ago

this is really not much different from ssh-ing to your GPU server and running ffmpeg. Very roundabout way to execute remote bash command on a server I dont meant to discourage you, but it is possible to replace your entire repo with a simple bash alias: alias ffmpeg-over-ip='ssh myserver "ffmpeg \"\$@\""'

steelbrain 2y ago
This comment gave me flashbacks to another comment I read a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 If your usecase is solved by an alias, that's really good! I am glad you can use an alias. My usecase required a bit more so I wrote this utility and am sharing it with my peers
- slt2021 2y ago
  Dropbox had a cutting edge file synchronization algorithm, they solved a problem of large file sync over unreliable network. There was a clear engineering IP they developed. (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...) I looked over your source code and just saw a bash wrapper with webserver, so no significant IP. Any potential innovations: like possible distributed transcoding, sharding/partitioning transcoding pipeline to speed-up are missing. its just a bash wrapper, thats why I commented about bash alias. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but I was honestly looking for some innovation about ffmpeg
  - steelbrain 2y ago
    This was not meant to offend. I appreciate you explaining your message further. There's no significant IP in this utility, it's something I wrote for a usecase and it works well for that usecase. I ran the server side on a windows machine, and I did not want to setup a full blown ssh server and expose it over the network for this usecase. Another thing was logging. The way logging is currently setup really hits the sweet spot for debugability for me. Lastly it's the rewrites. I've used the config to rewrite incoming codecs to something the machine supports. This is a purpose built utility that does one job and IMO does it fairly well. It's definitely not as complex as Dropbox but also not as simple as an ssh alias. I appreciate you sharing the alias code (not just the comment) so if some of our peers have usecases that could be solved by it, they are welcome to use that as well!

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Not to steal thunder (nice! Well done!) but also this reminded me to go check in on https://kyber.media https://kyber.media (currently a landing page), a ffmpeg streaming project from me ffmmpeg himself (I think?) Jean-Baptiste Kempf. He had a LinkedIn update two weeks ago, mentioning the effort! Yay! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbkempf_playruo-the-worlds-first-click-and-play-activity-7241806921547005952-wruW https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbkempf_playruo-the-worlds-fi... Submission from 6 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc

steelbrain 2y ago
Very cool! Thank you for sharing!

qwertox 2y ago

IDK, this lacks a lot of examples and explaining what exactly it is for. Is it for remote transcoding only? Because if so, the word transcoding does not appear neither in this Show HN nor in the GitHub README. And I can't think of any other use for this than to perform hardware-assisted transcoding on a remote machine. Apparently it has nothing to do with OpenGL or CUDA, which are the primary uses for a GPU. And ffmpeg itself has more use cases than just transcoding files.

dylan604 2y ago
I question for why not just SSH into the more powerful computer to run the ffmpeg command like a normal person. Why would you need to install a server and client? There are plenty of binaries available for ffmpeg to avoid compiling from source difficulties. Solutions like these are the things that just make me tilt my head and make the clueless "huh?" sound.
- oefrha 2y ago
  Because OpenSSH on Windows is a shitshow. Mounted SMB shares can’t be accessed because they’re tied to login sessions, and you can’t mount them from within an SSH session (IIRC in theory you can, but in practice it never worked for me).[1] Which means ffmpeg is practically useless if you need input that you can’t (e.g. livestream) or don’t want to copy in advance, or need output in realtime. At least that’s why I built something similar in Go for myself. Before anyone mentions WSL: it either didn’t support GPU passthrough or was very difficult to configure when I set this up a few years ago, don’t know about current status. And you can’t call Windows executables from WSL when you SSH into it. [1] https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/139 https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/139
  - dylan604 2y ago
    there are other ways to mount drives. you can even mount drives on a PC like normal computers with a "/" mount point instead of ridiculous C:\ stuff that does not require WSL. you can use a URI as an input to ffmpeg which allows for not needing access to a C:\. pretty much any decent NAS will allow access via URI instead of drive letter mounts. if something was learned during the building of the server/client app, then great if that's why it was done. but it's only one of the 99 ways of skinning the cat, and probably not even close to the best one.

NavinF 2y ago

> need a shared filesystem for this to work Oh oof. I thought removing that requirement would be the whole point of something named "FFmpeg-over-IP". Shared filesystem usually involves full trust between machines, bad network error handling, and setting things up by hand (different config on every distro)

steelbrain 2y ago
I hear you. If your usecase doesn't require live streaming of converted file, a sibling comment may fit the usecase: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41745593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41745593
- NavinF 2y ago
  Ah unfortunately my use case is similar to yours: Use Windows desktop to transcode files stored on a Linux NAS. My files are ~100GB so encoding multiple files in parallel would waste a lot of space and unnecessarily burn write cycles
  - steelbrain 2y ago
    FWIW, you can run an smb server from within a docker container (on the linux side). I forget which one I used but it makes the setup painless and you can configure different auth strategies as well. Network errors (little bit of packet loss) are generally handled by the underlying OS, and in case of windows, it can use multiple network paths simultaneously to give you the aggregate bandwidth.
    - linuxdude314 2y ago
      You typically don’t even have to go to that length. This is usually supported out of the box. No idea what problem this is trying to solve. Just seems like the user wasn’t familiar enough with how to use a NAS.
      - 2y ago

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago

I can encode faster than I can upload. Might be useful if you have gigabit to a computer more powerful than one in your home.

seltzered_ 2y ago

Can this possibly be helpful for second-screen (aka extended display) scenarios between a PC and a tablet/phone? Thinking of https://tuxphones.com/howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display-for-linux/ https://tuxphones.com/howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display... -> https://gitlab.com/tuxphones/side-displays https://gitlab.com/tuxphones/side-displays but for those running android or ios

LeoPanthera 2y ago

As other comments have suggested it's difficult to imagine that this has a lot of advantages to simply using pipes over ssh. And pipes don't need a shared filesystem either. I suppose ssh would be tricky if you're combining multiple input files.

_hyn3 2y ago
xargs
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  That doesn't help send multiple files over a single pipe. You can't just cat them.
  - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
    You can `tar` them though :)
    - LeoPanthera 2y ago
      That's true, although that requires storage on the other end. Not too much of a problem in most cases, perhaps. But with single input, single output, you can just do: ssh destination "ffmpeg -switches" <infile >outfile
      - _hyn3 2y ago
        you can xargs your files and even parallelize (read the xargs man page) before you ssh.
        bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        Great point! Something like this could work, modulo ffmpeg arguments which I didn't check. find . -name '*.mkv' \ -exec bash -c \ "ssh server ffmpeg < {} > {}.transcoded.mp4" \;

wwalexander 2y ago

How does this compare with the built-in ffserver? https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ffserver https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ffserver

qwertox 2y ago
> Warning: ffserver has been removed on 2018-01-06.
- wwalexander 2y ago
  Whoops, bit of banner blindness there, thank you for the heads-up!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

maxlin 2y ago

I wrote something similar to this. Instead of requiring a shared network drive, dependent files are automatically detected and transferred over with HTTP, and as an advanced feature, it splits the video to chunks to allow 20x+ encode speeds, concurrently utilizing multiple machines to encode a single input file and utilizing NVENC. Video is then concatenated together and API for that mode is identical. Wrote it in C# and it runs both on Windows and Linux. The original need for this actually was to accelerate encodes a system I run on a cloud VM needs when I have either my desktop or laptop available, who then work as encode slaves and pick up jobs, run them and send the output files back. If no slaves are available, the system falls back to local CPU encode. Later I ended up using this using a local Windows server machine as the "client" the slaves also connect to to ask for jobs (actually the system runs inside a Unity project in that case because C# is awesome). Probably a bit of a rare problem I hit with this is that different NVENC generations generate different enough bitstreams that they can't be concatenated together. From my pool of machines I found out only my RTX 2070 and RTX 3080 Mobile are compatible. GTX 970 and Quadro P5000 that I had laying around both were incompatible with that pool and with each other. Interestingly I found no similar software to the chunked encoding in my system, but am chalking it up on me not searching hard enough or these being integrated deep in to commercial/private systems. It would make sense that big players like YouTube have something like this in place, as reducing latency for individual upload transcodes finishing is beneficial instead of limiting their speed to a single hardware encoding / software encoding node. It's the same amount of processing that needs to be done in the end anyway, so might as well use 10 nodes to complete single jobs really quickly one after another

mdrzn 2y ago

"Your server has a weak GPU so you want to use the GPU from your gaming machine" would be my usecase for this, but it seems overly complicated, having to setup a shared filesystem. I have a VPS on OVH which uses ffmpeg to convert mp3 files from 320kbps to 128kbps, it runs at 32x real speed on the server, but it could run 100x faster on my desktop pc. If there was an easy way to let the VPS "run" ffmpeg from my machine, that'd be great.

9dev 2y ago
Use Tailscale (or really just WireGuard) to connect the server to your desktop, run it using this tool or ssh?
sulandor 2y ago
what is stopping you from taking the ovh-vps out of the equation?

mrkramer 2y ago

I was exploring running FFmpeg in the cloud and I stumbled upon this: https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/ https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/ What would be great is FFmpeg in the cloud with GUI for easier use.