Handbrake Interface Project¶

Handbrake is a pretty awesome encoder front end. It has a CLI and the idea for this project is to build a control daemon, including an encode queue.

Test and Other Useful Commands¶

These require curl and jq to be installed.

curl -s -X GET http://brutus:8081/queue | jq

curl -s -X POST -d "{"type": "add", "path": "/mnt/phalanx/key.txt"}" http://brutus:8081/command | jq

The following would clip the first 30 seconds, and then clip everything that is 10 seconds after that:

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:30.0 -i input.wmv -c copy -t 00:00:10.0 output.wmv
ffmpeg -ss 30 -i input.wmv -c copy -t 10 output.wmv

Enhancements¶

• Make encode parameters optionally configurable
• Detect subtitles in source content and handle them appropriately
• Appropriate user configuration for systemd (so service starts at boot)
• Install script
  • Need to check for and install prereqs if needed
  • Detect if module install (setup.py install) fails and exit script
• Create logrotate configuration (cannot stop encode during)
• Add script to get status of current encode only
• Improve security (use https mayhaps???)
• Turn off after configurable period of inactivity
• Send email when encodes are completed
• Display time queued in log
• Include initial and final file sizes in encode complete email

I'm going to attempt to work on this little by little and add things as I go...

Version History¶

v0.4.0 -- 2/24/2019

• feature: added initial and final file sizes in encode complete email

v0.3.0 -- 1/25/2019

• feature: added logrotate configuration for hbkcd.log

v0.2.0 -- 1/24/2019

• bugfix: queued duration fixed to be encode start minus time added
• feature: added optional email confirmation when encode is complete
• feature: added script (hbkcd_status) to get status of current encode
• feature: modified install.sh script to check for package and Python module dependencies and install any that are missing

v0.1.3 -- 1/23/2019

• bugfix: order of arguments when calculating elapsed time duration fixed so durations are no longer negative

v0.1.2 -- 1/11/2019

• Fixed bug in hbkcd_add.sh script that prevented adding paths with spaces
• Added item queued time to log
• Created simple install script

v0.1.1 -- 1/8/2019

• Fixed audio encode option bug when converting to AAC
• Added per file encode log containing the output of !HandBrake (very useful for debugging issues like the one above)

v0.1.0 -- 1/8/2019

• Basic daemon with systemd support
• JSON over HTTP Control interface supports add and list of encode queue
• Use ffprobe to determine size and framerate of input and set accordingly
• Encode source video with default parameters (h.265; AAC) using !HandBrake

Install¶

Also required are HandBrakeCLI and (statically linked) ffprobe.

$ sudo ./install.sh

Old Install Instructions:¶

• Packages:
  

  $ sudo apt install python3-setuptools python3-pip libmagic-dev
  

• Python modules:
  

  $ sudo pip3 install python-magic
  

• Run setup.py:
  

  $ sudo ./setup.py install
  

Resources¶

• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FFprobeTips
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13069634/python-daemon-and-systemd-service
• https://medium.com/@benmorel/creating-a-linux-service-with-systemd-611b5c8b91d6