vollbremsung

vollbremsung is a Handbrake bulk encoding tool, designed to reencode a file structure to a DLNA enabled TV compatible format comfortably.

Installation

Just run gem install vollbremsung

Dependencies

You need to have ffmpeg, ffprobe and HandbrakeCLI (on FreeBSD it's HandBrakeCLI if installed from the Portstree) somewhere in your $PATH.

Usage

vollbremsung [options] target [target [...]]

It takes target paths and probes them for suited files. If a target path is a file, it is the only match, if it is a directory all containing files with a matching file type (basically all the non MP4 multimedia types like avi, flv, mov, etc.) are taken. The --recursive option will extend the search scope to probe the sub filetree as well. It furthermore analyses each file for its structure utilising ffmpegs ffprobe tool in order to extend Handbrakes default preset, processing all audio and subtitle tracks, not only the first ones.

The video streams will be converted to h.264 while audio streams will enjoy the AAC codec. Every DLNA enabled TV should be able to handle these two.

The x264-preset used is veryfast which should be a good tradeoff most of the time. If you want to change this manually, use the --x264-preset [PRESET] option.

The --delete and --move option allow post processing actions. delete will of course remove the source file upon successful processing, while move will add a .old file extension for archive purposes. This is always a good option, just to be sure.

Additionally, vollbremsung can set the MP4 title tag to the filename via the --title option, in case the old file title metadata is somewhat misshapen.

Per default the m4v file extension is used to indicate that the files contain video content. It turned out that some TVs can't handle this extension and require plain mp4. The --mp4-ext option will make vollbremsung create mp4 files. You can of course rename the output files manually as well.

If you only want to know which files would match for a given target, use the --list-only option. No processing will be done, just the matches printed.

In order to only match a given range of file extensions, the --match option accepts a comma separated list of file extensions which will replace the default match scope. Thereby this can be used to extend the matching extensions in fact by just reusing the list printed from --help and adding extensions.

Complete list of options

-d, --delete                     Delete source files after successful encoding
    --list-only                  List matching files only. Do not run processing
    --match ext1,ext2,ext3       Match only specific file extensions
    --mp4-ext                    Use 'mp4' as file extension instead of 'm4v'
-m, --move                       Move source files to <FILENAME>.old after encoding
-q, --quality VALUE              Set quality value to use (default is: 22)
-r, --recursive                  Process subdirectories recursively as well
-t, --title                      Set the MP4 metadata title tag to the filename
    --preset PRESET              Set the x264/x265 preset. Default is: veryfast
    --x265                       Use x265 encoder for HEVC conversion
    --version                    Show program version information
-h, --help                       Show this message

Etymology

"vollbremsung" means "full application of the brake" in german.

Changelog

see CHANGELOG.md