Video assets with large or uncompressed video data can be transcoded as small files for the web and other devices.

Introduction

FFmpeg  includes multi-threading support and support of more than a hundred video codecs for transcoding.

It is licensed via  LGPL (Lesser GPL) .  Problems arises with the use of additional codices such as X. 264, which brings better results, but is under GPL and therefore may not be installed on censhare. One of the biggest strengths of 

If not already installed, go to the official  download area where you can find binaries for Linux, Windows and OS X. In case of doubt compile it yourself from the latest source code.

For moderate use cases, FFmpeg is sufficient as an only encoding solution. Depending on the size and quantity of video data you must think early enough about scalability in IT project planning. If you want to keep load of your application servers, you should operate FFmpeg separately on one or more service clients. In the default setting, FFMpeg can easily consume over 7 percent of the CPU by itself when transcoding despite a modern Quad-core i50 CPU.

Additional licensing costs might apply for commercial use depending on the application, for example:  MPEG LA. 

Prerequisites

You must always activate FFmpeg to generate previews (still images) for videos, even if you want to use Amazon Elastic Transcoder for video transcoding.

Configuration

After deploying censhare Server, you must import the supplied decoding preferences from the server's installation folder.

For   FFmpeg you can find a basic configuration of popular presets at:

censhare-Server/install/assets/optional/preset-ffmpeg

Included are (resolution = vertical):

  • FFmpeg MP4 MPEG4 AAC 1080p

  • FFmpeg MP4 MPEG4 AAC 720p

  • FFmpeg MP4 MPEG4 AAC 480p

  • FFmpeg MP4 MPEG4 AAC 360p

  • FFmpeg JPEG (still image)

  • FFmpeg HLS MPEG4 AAC (Streaming)

Then open the censhare Admin-Client and activate the service "Video: FFmpeg". Here you can also specify whether the transcoding should be done on the server locally or via a separate service client.

In the next step, you need to set up the modules for Video: enable and configure FFmpeg for video conversion [modules / video / aa-video-preview-action.xml].

For the module [file:modules/video/aa-video-preview.xml] (Video conversion (automatic) you can choose the trigger events. You can also specify at the end of the dialogue under "Special Settings", at which timestamp (seconds) a frame for the thumbnail is generated. By default, "Preset FFmpeg JPEG" needs to be selected in the pull-down.

If you wish, additional videos will be encoded as a storage item. Here you can select from the presets previously imported. As file type, select a video preview in the desired output size.

If you want to adjust the number of threads used by FFmpeg at the same time, it is possible to edit the preset XML and to insert a value at the appropriate location:

<parameter key = "-threads" value = "16" />
CODE

With an indeterminately large number of parameters, video specialists have a lot of options here and can finetune or create their own decoder preferences based on existing presets.