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.

Requirements

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

• The latest Docker-CE, not the Docker bundled with the running Linux Distribution should be used. This is to provide the best compatibility with the NVidia Container Toolkit. With newer distributions, such as Ubuntu 20.04, the distro bundled Docker seems to work fine. When in doubt, use the upstream.

• 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.

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 hardware dependencies.

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.

Docker Hub

While images get pushed automatically to Docker Hub, it's possible they will be unavailable due to limitations of Docker Hub free accounts. Alternatively, they are also available from my self hosted Harbor instance.

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

Harbor

These images are served from a self-hosted Harbor instance running in my Home Lab environment. As such, availability is subject to the vagaries of my internet connection and the health of my Home Lab.

• hub.skj.dev/img/other-transcode:nvidia-{version}
• hub.skj.dev/img/other-transcode:qsv-{version}
• hub.skj.dev.img/other-transcode:sw-{version}

Usage

Create a sub directory into which source files are put. In these examples I name that src.

\_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) \ 
  hub.skj.dev/img/other-transcode:sw-0.4.0 --x264-avbr --target 1080p=5000 \
  src/source_file.mkv
  
# QSV Encoding H.264
docker run --rm --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \
  hub.skj.dev/img/other-transcode:qsv-0.4.0 --target 1080p=6000 \
  src/source_file.mkv

# NVidia Encoding HEVC
docker run --rm --gpus all -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) \ 
  hub.skj.dev/img/other-transcode:nvidia-0.4.0 --hevc \
  src/source_file.mkv

About

Don Melton of Video Transcoding fame has brought his expertise to hardware accelerated transcoding in the form of Other Video Transcoding. While Don 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. Basically I've taken them, pulled out a lot of the ffmpeg compile options, added in the other-transcode dependencies, and finally bundled in other-transcode itself.