Allow on-the-fly transcoding via ffmpeg about stretto HOT 4 CLOSED

Hi @daltek ,

A key difference between node-music-player and subsonic and node-music-player is that although node-music-player works in a remote situation, it is usually run on a local computer. That said I do see that in the future running it as a remote streaming server.

I'm not sure exactly, but the cost of transcoding a song every single time a user wants to stream it sounds costly. I feel it would be a better option to convert it on the fly, but to pipe the output to both the filesystem and the response (standard output back to the client).

I also think that rather than making this the default, having a setting on the client-side that can be set that would then change the request url from /songs/:id to /transcode/:id which would transcode from whatever format it is in to mp3 (unless it is already mp3).

Do you have any coding skills to implement this? Info on the ffmpeg command that subsonic uses can be found here. I'll take a look at the pull request if you manage to implement it (also keep in mind that I want to keep the dependency on just node.js modules so that it is easily cross-platform should I finish implementing that one day).

I myself have a bunch of features I want to implement first.

from stretto.

Also this ffmpeg library (should we opt to depend on ffmpeg) can convert the audio codec and send the stream to two places just fine. It would look something like the following (with res being the response it is the response the client is requesting):

ffmpeg('/path/to/infile.flac')
  .format('mp3')
  .output('/path/to/outfile.mp3')
  .output(res);

from stretto.

Hello Ben,

Thanks for your replies and consideration.

I like the idea of copying transcoded output back to the filesystem for future use. Unfortunately I have absolutely no experience with nodejs, and negligible programming experience beyond a few shell scripts. I'll count this project as one more reason why I should make the effort to learn a bit though!

Meanwhile I wish you every success and will keep an eye on the project; great stuff.
Best wishes.

from stretto.

Closing as this is an enhancement and has been added to trello.
Trying to keep github issues to just bugs and in-progress development.
Trello card for reference: https://trello.com/c/WmudxWuo/53-allow-on-the-fly-transcoding-via-ffmpeg

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