[HN Gopher] Show HN: FFmpeg-over-IP - Connect to remote FFmpeg s...
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       Show HN: FFmpeg-over-IP - Connect to remote FFmpeg servers
        
       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
        
       Author : steelbrain
       Score  : 139 points
       Date   : 2024-10-04 17:49 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | steelbrain wrote:
       | 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... [2]:https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-
       | over-ip/tree/swift-lang
        
         | Cyph0n wrote:
         | Go would be a good fit for this kind of application. But Rust
         | is a great choice too.
         | 
         | Keep up the good work!
        
         | chrisldgk wrote:
         | 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/ [2]
         | https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables
        
       | steelbrain wrote:
       | Here[1] is the original HN comment that inspired me to do a Show
       | HN :)
       | 
       | [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205253
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Thank you for the Show HN!
        
       | steelbrain wrote:
       | 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
        
       | leshokunin wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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).
        
           | leshokunin wrote:
           | Maybe you could make guides and post it on the various
           | synology and self hosting subreddits. I could see this get
           | traction
        
           | blue_cookeh wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
       | 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/
        
       | slt2021 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | This comment gave me flashbacks to another comment I read a
         | while ago: 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 wrote:
           | 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-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 wrote:
             | 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!
        
           | KolmogorovComp wrote:
           | > My usecase required a bit more so I wrote this utility and
           | am sharing it with my peers
           | 
           | Can you expand on that?
        
             | steelbrain wrote:
             | For sure! One of the software I was working with was
             | hardcoding what codecs it would use based on the operating
             | system it was running on. The rewrites section of the
             | configuration allows more than just file paths, I've used
             | it to rewrite incoming codec requests
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | I suppose this only works if you have some shared filesystem.
         | Or does this work with piping too?
        
           | slt2021 wrote:
           | the original poster's project also requires shared
           | filesystem.
           | 
           | as for bash-ssh solution, you don't need shared FS, if you
           | don't need intermediate results. you can use SCP to get the
           | final result after transcoding has finished. something like:
           | alias ffmpeg-over-ip='ssh myserver "ffmpeg \"\$@\"
           | /tmp/output/"'       alias download-results='scp
           | myserver:/tmp/output/*.* .'            ffmpeg-over-ip <args>
           | && download-results
           | 
           | my meta point being is, before engineering something with
           | programming language, and handrolling webservers, with auth,
           | and workers - just try to implement your system with bash
           | scripts.
           | 
           | Martin Klepmann created an entire database using just bash
           | aliases in his book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"
        
             | whoopdedo wrote:
             | Even the temporary file is optional. Ffmpeg supports a
             | number of network protocols. For instance, you could read
             | from one port and write to another with
             | ffmpeg -f webm -i tcp://[::]:55601?listen -c copy -f webm
             | tcp://[::]:55602?listen
             | 
             | There's also UDP, SFTP, and more convenient protocols such
             | as SRT or the long-in-the-tooth RTMP. I expect it will
             | eventually add WHIP/WHEP as well.
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | I experimented a bit with piping, but it turned out that
               | mp4 doesn't always like to be streamed.
        
         | asveikau wrote:
         | I would add screen or tmux to that because you may run a long
         | job that you may want to get back to after a connection drop.
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | Not to steal thunder (nice! Well done!) but also this reminded me
       | to go check in on 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-fi...
       | 
       | Submission from 6 months ago,
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc
        
         | steelbrain wrote:
         | Very cool! Thank you for sharing!
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | oefrha wrote:
               | Don't know why you're fixated on NAS, I use my program
               | mostly from my Mac laptop and desktop, and it allows me
               | to simply replace ffmpeg with ffmpeg-remote, nothing
               | more, which is not true for ssh (thanks double quoting).
               | The thing took me less than hour to write and has been
               | running for years, I don't need to learn anything new to
               | justify the trivial amount of investment. I also wrote a
               | simple utility to monitor all my ffmpeg-remote processes,
               | reporting all kinds of statistics, which is more involved
               | if I was running a raw ssh command. And who cares about
               | "the best" way, and who are you to decide my simple
               | solution isn't the best for me?
        
       | NavinF wrote:
       | > 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
           | NavinF wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | oefrha wrote:
               | More like you're not familiar enough with the video
               | encoding performance of a typical NAS that is not in the
               | thousand dollar range. Or what's a NAS -- it can be
               | anything really.
        
               | linuxdude314 wrote:
               | Why would you transcode on the NAS? Not what I'm
               | suggesting at all; perf on most NAS is awful for that...
               | 
               | There's a pretty well understood concept of what a NAS
               | is; this isn't a complicated philosophical problem.
               | 
               | A very common workflow in motion picture production is to
               | use NAS for storage on a fast network, mount the SMB
               | share, have a script/tool/app that monitors the ingest
               | directory and writes to an output dir.
               | 
               | FWIW the key differentiator between a NAS and other types
               | of network storage is the protocols they use.
               | 
               | If files is the main primitive, it's a NAS; it's its
               | blocks it's considered a SAN.
               | 
               | Sometimes SANs have NAS "heads" for clients that want
               | file access or a block level storage device.
        
               | otterley wrote:
               | My five-year-old Synology DS418play has support for
               | hardware realtime transcoding via its integrated low-
               | power GPU. I think I paid about $600 for it. You can get
               | a new DS423+ for about the same price.
        
               | NavinF wrote:
               | > out of the box
               | 
               | If you're talking about how today's open source NAS
               | software has a button for enabling NFS/SMB on a
               | directory:
               | 
               | 1. I built my NAS long before software like that was
               | common. Some of my custom stuff (Eg tiered storage,
               | storing the first few seconds of every video on flash,
               | etc) would be a pain to migrate.
               | 
               | 2. Some of my Windows machines are untrusted. Unlike the
               | NAS, they have internet access. I can't give them read
               | access to the entire NAS, but I still want to use their
               | GPUs and CPUs to run ffmpeg on arbitrary files on the
               | NAS.
               | 
               | 3. I could spend a day writing more code to move files in
               | and out of a shared directory every time I need to run
               | ffmpeg on them. But I was hoping "FFmpeg-over-IP" would
               | let me run a remote ffmpeg on a local file. Like calling
               | an RPC
        
               | linuxdude314 wrote:
               | Did you build your NAS in the 90's or early 2000's?
               | 
               | This has been available in Synology and QNAP devices for
               | that long...
               | 
               | I used to own the tape library that is the Disney Vault.
               | A common pattern for transcoding is to have a watched
               | folder. Drop files you need transcoded in, get files you
               | want in a diff directory when finished.
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | One could write a small Python server in one day which
           | receives a chunked POST request and transcodes the video on
           | the fly.
           | 
           | The same server could also offer a download link for the
           | transcoded video, and also receive URL parameters for the
           | transcoding options. Or the transcoded video itself is
           | returned after the subprocess finishes.
           | 
           | Something along the lines of:
           | 
           | Server                 import asyncio       import subprocess
           | from aiohttp import web       async def
           | transcode_video(request):           cmd = [
           | "ffmpeg",               "-i", "pipe:0",               "-f",
           | "mp4",               "-preset", "fast",
           | "output_file.mp4"           ]           process = await
           | asyncio.create_subprocess_exec(               *cmd,
           | stdin=subprocess.PIPE,               stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
           | stderr=subprocess.PIPE           )           async for chunk
           | in request.content.iter_any():
           | process.stdin.write(chunk)               await
           | process.stdin.drain()           await process.stdin.close()
           | await process.wait()           return
           | web.Response(text="Video transcoded successfully!")       app
           | = web.Application()       app.router.add_post('/upload',
           | transcode_video)       if __name__ == '__main__':
           | web.run_app(app, port=8080)
           | 
           | Client                 curl -X POST
           | http://<server_ip>:8080/upload \            --header
           | "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \            --data-
           | binary @video.mp4
           | 
           | This way no shared filesystem is required.
        
             | steelbrain wrote:
             | This and the other solutions in this thread wont work with
             | plex or the media servers. The way it works with the media
             | servers is that there's a variable number of _outputs_ ,
             | and you just cant emulate that on the client side without a
             | virtual filesystem or by some creative hacks that use
             | multiple file descriptors (even then how do you handle
             | dynamic?).
             | 
             | As for why the variable number of outputs exist in the
             | first place, it's because when you're a media server, you
             | dont want to wait until the full file is converted before
             | serving it to the user. You want to start playing
             | immediately so the output is chunked into multiple files
        
         | yarg wrote:
         | Couldn't you create and share a virtual file system with FUSE?
        
           | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
           | Like SSHFS, or something custom? And how much does that help
           | with any of those concerns?
        
             | yarg wrote:
             | The primary concern is trust/security.
             | 
             | User space limits potential security impacts, and a
             | restricted VFS could be used to prevent clients from
             | accessing anything that they shouldn't.
             | 
             | (Although I'm not even pretending to know whether or not
             | this is a remotely good idea - my guess is that it isn't,
             | but I'd like to know just how bad an idea it actually is.)
        
           | NavinF wrote:
           | Mounting anything requires root even if you use FUSE.
           | 
           | There are ways to intercept writes without root and send them
           | to another machine. Eg you could use LD_PRELOAD. But that's
           | exactly the kind of pain in the ass that I was hoping a
           | project named FFmpeg-over-IP would automate.
        
             | duped wrote:
             | mount doesn't require root, but even without getting into
             | mount namespaces, this is why fusermount3 exists
        
               | NavinF wrote:
               | Interesting, the man page says "To allow mounting and
               | unmounting by unprivileged users, fusermount3 needs to be
               | installed set-uid root". Is this the default case on any
               | distros?
        
               | duped wrote:
               | It's the case on all distros that distribute it, because
               | otherwise it's useless.
        
       | Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
       | 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_ wrote:
       | 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... -> https://gitlab.com/tuxphones/side-displays but for
       | those running android or ios
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | xargs
        
           | LeoPanthera wrote:
           | That doesn't help send multiple files over a single pipe. You
           | can't just cat them.
        
             | bqmjjx0kac wrote:
             | You can `tar` them though :)
        
               | LeoPanthera wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | you can xargs your files and even parallelize (read the
               | xargs man page) _before_ you ssh.
        
               | bqmjjx0kac wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
       | How does this compare with the built-in ffserver?
       | https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ffserver
        
         | qwertox wrote:
         | > Warning: ffserver has been removed on 2018-01-06.
        
           | wwalexander wrote:
           | Whoops, bit of banner blindness there, thank you for the
           | heads-up!
        
       | maxlin wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | "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 wrote:
         | Use Tailscale (or really just WireGuard) to connect the server
         | to your desktop, run it using this tool or ssh?
        
         | sulandor wrote:
         | what is stopping you from taking the ovh-vps out of the
         | equation?
        
       | mrkramer wrote:
       | I was exploring running FFmpeg in the cloud and I stumbled upon
       | this: https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/
       | 
       | What would be great is FFmpeg in the cloud with GUI for easier
       | use.
        
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