README.md

ffmpeg over IP

Connect to remote ffmpeg servers. Are you tired of unsuccessfully trying to pass your GPU through to a docker container running in a VM? So was I! ffmpeg-over-ip allows you to run an ffmpeg server on a machine with access to a GPU (Linux, Windows, or Mac) and connect to it from a remote machine. The only thing you need is Node.js installed and a shared filesystem (could be NFS, SMB, etc.) between the two machines.

Installation

ffmpeg-over-ip consists of two main parts, the server and the client. Both are packed neatly into single JS files. You can download these from the npm interface or by npm install ffmpeg-over-ip and then copying them to the relevant places. You don't need any node_modules to run the server or the client.

The javascript files require Node.js runtime to work. If you want standalone files that you can mount in a docker container, you can find these in the Github Releases. On the releases page, you may have to click "Show all assets" to see the files.

Configuration

The server and the client are both configured using JSONC (JSON with comments) configuration files. The paths of these files can be flexible. To identify which paths are being used, you can invoke either with --debug-print-search-paths.

Template/example configuration files are provided in this repository for your convinience. Unless the server and the client share the same filesystem, you may have to specify rewrites in the server configuration file.

Usage

Both the server and the client files are executable, so long as there is a Node.js installation available. If you intend to use this in a docker container, you can directly mount the client file to where the container would expect a regular ffmpeg executable to be, ie docker run -v ./path/to/client-bin:/usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg/ffmpeg ....

The server and the client communicate commands over HTTP, so make sure that whatever port you specify on the server is allowed through the firewall.

Assuming you download one of the release files, here's what the usage would look like

On the client side

$ ./ffmpeg-over-ip-client --debug-print-search-paths # See the places where it'll look for config
$ cp template.ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc # Add config to one of the places
$ nano ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc # Change the stuff you want
$ ./ffmpeg-over-ip-client <use like ffmpeg, add ffmpeg args here>

On the server side

$ ./ffmpeg-over-ip-server --debug-print-search-paths # See the places where it'll look for config
$ cp template.ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc # Add config to one of the places
$ nano ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc # Change the stuff you want, especially the rewrites
$ ./ffmpeg-over-ip-server

Assuming you want to download these from npm, here's how you would do it

On the client side:

$ npm install ffmpeg-over-ip
$ ./node_modules/.bin/ffmpeg-over-ip-client --debug-print-search-paths # See the places where it'll look for config
$ cp template.ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc # Add config to one of the places
$ nano ffmpeg-over-ip.client.jsonc # Change the stuff you want
$ ./node_modules/.bin/ffmpeg-over-ip-client <use like ffmpeg, add ffmpeg args here>

On the server side:

$ npm install ffmpeg-over-ip
$ ./node_modules/.bin/ffmpeg-over-ip-server --debug-print-search-paths # See the places where it'll look for config
$ cp template.ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc # Add config to one of the places
$ nano ffmpeg-over-ip.server.jsonc # Change the stuff you want, especially the rewrites
$ ./node_modules/.bin/ffmpeg-over-ip-server

License

The contents of this project are licensed under the terms of the MIT License.