ffmpeg-watch-encode

A Docker container designed to watch a directory and encode a .mkv file at a desired CRF (Constant Rate Factor). The purpose of this is to reduce the file size of 4K HDR .mkv's by reducing the overall quality, but preserving all audio and subtitle streams.

Designed to be deployed to Unraid.

Build and tag the image

docker build . -t ffmpeg

Run the container with mounted volumes

# Run from cloned repository
docker run -v `pwd`/watch:/watch -v `pwd`/output:/output -v `pwd`/copy:/copy -v `pwd`/logs:/logs ffmpeg

# Run from Docker Hun
docker run -v `pwd`/watch:/watch -v `pwd`/output:/output -v `pwd`/copy:/copy -v `pwd`/logs:/logs charlocharlie/ffmpeg-watch-encode

Stopping the container

For some reason you can't CTRL-C out of the above command, so to stop the container, open another terminal and do:

docker container ls
# Copy the container ID for the ffmpeg-watch-encode container
docker container stop <container ID>

Options

You can configure some encoding options with environment variables:

Variable Name	Default	Description
ENCODER	libx265	Pick the encoder to use. The below options may behave differently when not using the libx265 encoder.
CRF	28	A quality factor for the encode from 0.0-58.0. Lower numbers are better quality and higher file size.
PRESET	medium	x265 encoder preset. Set as low as you're willing to wait. See https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/default/presets.html
TUNE	(none)	x265 encoder tuning. See https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/default/presets.html#tuning