RFC: Transcoding

[onedr0p]

This is mainly also on the topic of transcoding, I know you have some opinions on Midarr and transcoding but this is to bring up a discussion transcoding and how it could be implemented if you were to ever think about adding such abilities.

The way Midarr works currently is that transcoding is not really supported, anything outside x264 most likely will not play. I wonder if it is worth the effort to use jellyfin's ffmpeg as a library to integrate transcoding in general.

On the topic of distributed transcoding

Given you agree that transcoding is on the slate for possibly being implemented...

I really love that I can scale midarr to n number of pods in kubernetes, however there is no way to "load balance" transcoding requests so that an overworked container will not pick up new requests for transcoding.

These are just questions to chew over on future ideas of Midarr.

[trueChazza]

Thanks for opening this discussion. I think this is definitely a topic worth talking and exploring more about, and as you’ve mentioned Midarr now has a half baked solution for this.

You’ve brought up a few interesting points to discuss:

• ffmpeg jellyfin
• x264 support only
• Load balancing across Midarr instances (particularly for transcoding)

[trueChazza]

ffmpeg jellyfin

What is the benefit of this over say just ffmpeg itself? A quick look through the repo it seems jellyfin has correlated only the tools they need for their transcoding pipeline.

Unless I’m missing something?

[trueChazza]

I’m all for not reinventing the wheel and have looked into other external / decoupled solutions like Go Transcode before doing a basic Midarr implementation.

Go Transcode not only provides the ffmpeg / transcoder implementation, but also the “glue” or interface Midarr can consume for transcoding.

[trueChazza]

If Go Transcode is a viable option to get us up and running quickly, but also achieve load balancing across Midarr instances. All that we’d need really is the Midarr implementation for it.

[onedr0p]

I just picked jellyfins ffmpeg because I figured it would be a fork of ffmpeg geared towards transcoding various different types of media so many nothing too special there.

go-transcode seems interesting as well!

[trueChazza]

Would you be willing to test out Go Transcode and see if it’s a good viable solution?

It’s come a long way since I last looked at it. It didn’t have VOD support back then, which I see it does now.

[trueChazza]

What exactly is Midarr lacking in its albeit basic transcoder at the moment?

How does it play your media that previously you said didn’t have any audio?

If you had a wishlist for Midarr transcoding, what would that be?

[onedr0p]

If you had a wishlist for Midarr transcoding, what would that be?

That's a pretty hard question to answer because I am very much in love with Kubernetes for managing containers. It would be awesome if Midarr could have a "transcoding" service which would be a dedicated number of "warm" containers just for transcoding.

To get deeper into the weeds it would amazing if Midarr could speak to the kubernetes API to create/destroy pods on demand for transcoding while also having "warm" transcoding pods already available. As far as I know in standard docker-compose land, or hell even using a thing like Portainer this would not be possible. Kubernetes is amazing at automation like which is why I am so in love with managing containers with it.

A Midarr Kubernetes operator would be amazing if you wanted to learn more about Kubernetes 😄 but I understand this is a huge change and would require major refactoring. You did ask for a wishlist though 🤣

[trueChazza]

Yeah Kubernetes is amazing I agree!

That’s quite a Wishlist 🤣 a Midarr K8s operator sounds interesting, but is out of scope for the Midarr app itself.

I created exstream as the upstream transcoding service Midarr currently relies on. Packaging this service up in its own Docker container would be a start - and we’d be able to scale this n number of containers in K8s and Docker etc. How does that sound?

Plus by all means - if you’re keen to create a Midarr K8s operator, you have my full support!

[onedr0p]

Maybe an operator could be done in the long term. Breaking out the transcoding from the main app would be very neat in any way it could be done. That would really set Midarr apart from the other players in the game like Jellyfin and Plex which are behemoth monoliths.

[trueChazza]

Yeah wouldn’t take much to package up exstream, I’ll just need to figure out the public API for it 😁

I’ll look into it after v3 release. Let’s keep this conversation going though - a lot of great ideas already!

[bo0tzz]

I just had this idea and came here to find the discussion about transcoding already going, but I figured I'll share it anyways: Midarr's approach of leveraging existing services that people are already running is very nice. If that could somehow be applied to transcoding too, for example by hooking into something like Tdarr, that would be pretty cool. I don't know whether Tdarr (or other software like it) would support something like that at all though.

If that's not possible, I agree with onedr0p that breaking out the transcoding to exstream or another app running externally would be very nice to have. Over at Immich we don't need to do any live media handling, but we still have all the processing done in a separate container which keeps the main UI/API nice and responsive and makes scaling easier to reason about too :D

[onedr0p]

Tdarr not being open source is a full stop for me.

[bo0tzz]

I wasn't aware of that, but I agree! I just used Tdarr to illustrate my idea, I believe there are other similar applications out there that are open source.