Every video plays YouTube's way: hls.js reads the connection and picks the
quality, or one is picked by hand, or Original plays the file as it is. The
qualities (a ladder by size, H.264) are made on the fly in 3 s pieces from
wherever the viewer seeks, one ffmpeg per play, paused when far enough ahead.
360 videos open in a look-around view (drag, pinch or scroll to zoom from
8 to 300 degrees, phone motion).
Settings -> Transcode device picks the machine and device that makes them,
for every machine's files: a machine transcoding another's file reads it
through the hub by a token for that one file. Replaces the codec/size picker
and the single-quality re-encoder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The viewer tries the file as it is first. When the browser gives up — Safari and an MKV,
HEVC without a hardware decoder — or on a tap, a picker: codec (H.264, HEVC, AV1, or the
original codec repackaged) and size (original, 1080p, 720p, 480p), each codec labelled
with the engine this machine would use. POST /api/files/play runs ffmpeg into an HLS
event playlist of fragmented-MP4 segments under <data dir>/transcode/<id>/; Safari plays
HLS itself and everything else goes through hls.js, loaded only then. The recipes are
tried best first: a card on the bus before the integrated GPU, decoding on the same card
before decoding on the CPU and uploading, the software encoders last; a recipe that
produces no first segment is dropped for the next. The seekable range grows as ffmpeg
gets ahead; status says how far. Streams are reused for the same request, closed when
the player goes, swept after ten idle minutes, and the folder is emptied at start. Root
mode runs ffmpeg as root through a helper that ends when the daemon lets go of it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The package was named for its first job; it now also decides what a file is for the
Files tab (image, video, audio) and reads its streams, which the viewer will need. Inspect
is the richer probe — codec, profile, pixel format, size, frame rate, HDR transfer, the
audio beside it, container and duration — run as root through sudo when asked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
