Docker container for Don Melton's Other-Transcode Tool

The other-transcode tool leverages ffmpeg, and by default tries to take advantage of hardware accelerated encoding. Since the different hardware dependencies are of varying levels of size and complexity, I've broken them up into three image types, nvidia, qsv, and sw.

NVidia

This image builds ffmpeg with NVidia & CUDA libraries, and should be used on systems that have an NVENC capable NVidia card.

There is also a /usr/local/bin/special-transcode script that can be used for express transcoding. Its options are limited, as it's designed to be a more targeted tool. To use it, adjust the entrypoint when the container is run.

Requirements

• The latest NVidia drivers from NVidia, not the ones bundled with the running Linux Distribution, should be used.

• The NVidia Container Toolkit must be installed. It's very important to restart the Docker daemon after installation as it updates the Docker configuration.

QSV

This image builds ffmpeg with the Intel Media SDK to provide direct use of Intel's QSV system. That combined with VAAPI provides a high quality and performant transcode. Performance is very dependent on both clock speed and iGPU variant.

Requirements

• The i915 kernel module must be loaded
• /dev/dri devices must be available. This is a typical default, since it's also a requirement for Intel systems without discrete video.

SW

This image is for only using software encoding via ffmpeg. It is also the only image that attempts to provide both an Intel (amd64) and ARM (arm64) image, as there are no video hardware dependencies.

There is also a /usr/local/bin/classic-transcode script that can be used for express transcoding. It defaults to x264-cbr mode. The included script has also been modified to use libfdk_aac since support is built into the container's ffmpeg, and it provides better quality.

Prebuilt Images

The base image version exactly tracks the other-transcode version. The {version} suffix can be replaced with latest to track the latest builds.

All images are hosted via GitHub Container Registry

• ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:nvidia-{version}
• ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:qsv-{version}
• ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:sw-{version}

Usage

The software inside the container needs to be able to both read and write to a location outside of itself. This means both an input and an output location must be specified. Since other-transcode writes to its working directory, it's important that you use a directory structure that provides a separation between the source material and the output. Alternatively, the paths can be specified as different bind mounts to the container.

Single Bind Mount

To use a single bind mount, the easiest approach is to place the source files in a sub directory (src in this example) to the output. The the /src/source_file.mkv can be used at the input path, and the output will go into the root of the bind mount, or $(pwd).

\_src
  \_source_file.mkv

Using that setup, to transcode source_file.mkv with the default H264 encoding, some recommended Docker commands for the different images are listed below. For more options, see Don's Documentation. The important thing to be aware of here is to make sure the tag name lines up with the hardware you're planning on using.

# Software Encoding H.264
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \ 
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:sw-latest --x264-cbr \
  src/source_file.mkv
  
# QSV Encoding H.264
docker run --rm --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:qsv-latest \
  src/source_file.mkv

# NVidia Encoding HEVC
docker run --rm --gpus all -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \ 
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:nvidia-latest --hevc \
  src/source_file.mkv

Multiple Bind Mounts

There are many reasons why moving the source material into a sub directory might be non-optimal. An obvious one is the source is on a different filesystem, either block or network storage, than where the output is going. For this scenario, it's important to set the working directory to the bind mount location that is desinated as the output destination. As an example, lets assume the source material is on a network mounted volume at /mnt/nas1/video/rips, and the output is going into /mnt/nas2/video/compressed. The idea is there are two different mount points that are both network attached storage. One has the rips, and is maybe on a large slow NAS. The destination is maybe on a smaller, but faster NAS that's also running something like Plex, which will be the consumer for the transcoded files.

# Software Encoding H.264
docker run --rm -v /mnt/nas1/video/rips:/src -v /mnt/nas2/video/compressed:/out -w /out \
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:sw-latest --x264-cbr  \
  /src/source_file.mkv

# QSV Encoding H.264
docker run --rm --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
  -v /mnt/nas1/video/rips:/src  -v /mnt/nas2/video/compressed:/out -w /out \
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:qsv-latest \
  /src/source_file.mkv

# NVidia Encoding HEVC
docker run --rm --gpus all -v \
   -v /mnt/nas1/video/rips:/src  -v /mnt/nas2/video/compressed:/out -w /out \ 
  ghcr.io/ttys0/other-transcode:nvidia-latest --hevc \
  /src/source_file.mkv

About

Lisa Melton of Video Transcoding fame has brought her expertise to hardware accelerated transcoding in the form of Other Video Transcoding. While Lisa covers the installation and usage of other-transcode for all normal desktop platforms, this repository's focus is using other-transcode as a Docker container.

I have leaned heavily on Julien Rottenberg's ffmpeg Dockerfiles.