This post has been sitting in my drafts since 2012. I still use the system described below (occasionally) and it seemed a shame not to post the approach for others to use.
I had a ton of transcoding of videos for storage on my home server/mythbox. My tool of choice has been HandBrake, specifically the CLI version. As I had a fair few videos to get through I wanted to set up some automated system for doing the transcoding. Here is the simple bash script I came up with:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 |
#!/bin/sh HANDBRAKE_OPTS="-e x264 -q 20.0 -a 1 -E ac3 -B 160 -6 auto -R Auto,Auto -D 0.0 -f mkv --detelecine --decomb --loose-anamorphic -m -2 -T -x b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50" MAILTO=me@webworxshop.com MAILFROM=transcoder@webworxshop.com BASEDIR=/mnt/media/transcoding #BASEDIR=. INDIR=$BASEDIR/queue OUTDIR=$BASEDIR/mkvs DONEDIR=$BASEDIR/done if [ -e $BASEDIR/.lock ] then echo "Lock file exists, exiting." exit 1 fi touch $BASEDIR/.lock echo $INDIR for dir in $(find $INDIR/ -type d | grep VIDEO_TS); do toks=(`echo $dir | tr "/" "\n"`) HandBrakeCLI -i $dir --main-feature -o $OUTDIR/${toks[4]}.mkv $HANDBRAKE_OPTS mv $INDIR/${toks[4]} $DONEDIR/${toks[4]} # send the email echo "To: $MAILTO" > msg.txt echo "From: $MAILFROM" >> msg.txt echo "Subject: Transcode Complete" >> msg.txt echo "" >> msg.txt echo "Transcoding ${toks[4]} completed sucessfully!" >> msg.txt cat msg.txt | msmtp $MAILTO rm msg.txt rm $BASEDIR/.lock exit 0; done |
The script requires that you set it up in a directory (
/mnt/media/transcoding on my system) with three sub-directories (
queue ,
mkvs and
done ). The script will transcode one video from the
queue directory on each run. The idea is that the script should be run from cron several times a day when your machine isn’t doing very much else (I run mine overnight and when I’m at work). When the script is done it will send you an email to tell you and move the source file into the
done directory. The transcoded file will be dropped into the
mkvs directory. Obviously, the script will just exit if there’s nothing in the queue. This means that once the system is set up all you have to do is drop new videos into the
queue directory and they will be transcoded automatically.
Let me know if you find this useful, or suggest improvements in the comments.
