My use-case: streaming video to a Linux virtual mount and want compression of said video files on the fly.

Rclone has an experimental remote for compression but this stuff is important to me so that’s no good. I know rsync can do it but will it work for video files, and how I get rsync to warch the virtual mount-point and automatically compress and move over each individual file to rclone for upload to the Cloud? This is mostly to save on upload bandwidth and storage costs.

Thanks!

Edit: I’m stupid for not mentioning this, but the problem I’m facing is that I don’t have much local storage, which is why I wanted a transparent compression layer and directly push everything to the Cloud. This might not be worth it though since video files are already compressed. I will take a look at handbrake though, thanks!

  • Björn TantauEnglish
    10•1 month ago

    What is your end goal? Do you want to back up your videos with minimal storage costs? Compression won’t help you (because videos are already compressed) unless you can accept data loss through re-encoding. Handbrake (or pure ffmpeg) would be the tool to re-encode lots of files. This could save you space but you may have some loss of quality, depending on the configuration you use and how the original videos are encoded.

    If you just want the videos to be available for streaming, tools like Jellyfin or Emby would do the job. They are servers that re-encode your media for streaming on the fly, depending on the client capabilities and your bandwidth settings.

    • @MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2•1 month ago

      The problem is that I don’t have local storage, and neither do I have very good upload bandwidth. Compression could in theory solve the bandwidth problem and cloud storage costs to an extent, but I completely missed the part about video being already compressed. I’ll take a look at handbrake though, essentially what I want is a transparent layer that will compress video files (or reencode video files since the former seems pointless) without touching local storage and shove it into my virtual FUSE system to upload directly to the Cloud.