UnicornTranscoder VS rffmpeg

Just having support for a remote transcoder, along the lines of unicorn transcoder or rffmpeg would be a good first step to let us start homebrewing a solution.

There's this project - https://github.com/UnicornTranscoder/UnicornTranscoder That lets you use a remote transcoder, but idk if the project is maintained anymore.

There are some projects to distribute transcoding jobs like the Unicorn Transcoder (last activity in 2021), Remote Transcoder (last activity in 2017) or the Kubernetes project (last activity in 2020)

Interesting, I wasn't aware they tweaked it so much. Projects like Unicorn Transcoder made it seem like you could just drop-in replace it with a different binary.

There was/is a Project for remote transcoding, the Unicorn Trancoder which might help but the last commit in that project was made in Oct. 2021.

On the other hand, there is a Project called Unicorn Transcoder which is to offload the transcoding job on a different machine. If that works with plex optimization or just the "on-the-fly" transcoder, I don't know.

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

I got rffmpeg for distributed transcoding. Probably I understood Tdarr wrong, Tdarr leaves the files already transcoded or does transcoding on demand just like Rffmpeg? I got a lot of content on 4k that I would prefer to leave it like this for the best clients, and transcode as needed for 1080p computers

I'd love to point out https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg

Just having support for a remote transcoder, along the lines of unicorn transcoder or rffmpeg would be a good first step to let us start homebrewing a solution.

In the rare case you need transcoding I would suggest you use a script like rffmpeg to offload transcoding to a more powerful target and/or use my script which creates trascoding workers when need be and deletes them afterwards (could be used with Unmanic as well).

rffmpeg

> Also, remote transcoding of videos seems like a huge win! Makes it so you won't need as beefy as a system to run PeerTube.

You can technically do it if you're willing to hack around. Since it uses the ffmpeg binary you could technically replace it with rffmpeg[1], the setup isn't pretty but it's doable. I haven't done it myself but have seen reddit posts on the jellyfin community that it works pretty well once setup.

[1] https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg

If it's a normal Jellyfin install you can just use the rffmpeg python script directly, or you could run docker on Windows or WSL.

Maybe in the future you can use multiple machines to do your transcoding?

rffmpeg is supposed to do that. I haven't used it.