wheel.jack

wheel.jack is a collection of BASH format shell scripts that convert a directory of video files with inconsistent format and naming conventions to a single unified format and synchronise them to an output directory, possibly on a NAS.

The source directory is scanned for video files, any that don't exist in the destination directory will be transcoded to an output format that has been tuned to the high profile, level 4.1, H.264 MPEG-4 with 1 Mb/s bitrate and 128kb/s stereo AAC audio format supported by XBOX 360 and many similar generation consoles and players.

Videos are also renamed and retitled during the transcoding process using the following convention:

/src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.mkv would be titled "A Movie (2001)" and saved to /dst/Movies/a-movie-2001-1080p.mp4

/src/Shows/Some.Show.S01E03.Episode.Title.1080p.mkv would be titled "Some Show S01E03 Episode Title" and saved to dst/shows/Some Show/Some Show S01/some-show-s01e03-episode-title-1080p.mp4

Both the destination directory and filename can be slugified independently by altering the slug setting in the config file. Slugification makes filenames a bit easier to deal with by converting them to lowercase, removing all punctuation and replacing all spaces with dashes.

Prerequisites

wheel.jack makes use of ffmpeg and rsync to install these on a Debian based system use:

$ sudo apt install ffmpeg rsync

Installation

no installation required just edit the config file to reflect your set-up then work from within the process-video directory.

Examples

To transcode all new files and save them to the remote directory:

$ ./process-video

To transcode a single file and output it to the wheel.jack directory:

$ ./process-one /path/to/video-file.mkv

wheel.jack tries to determine the minimum amount of transcoding it can get away with to produce a compatible output file, if it gets this wrong and produces a file which isn't compatible with the target system you can force it to fully transcode the file by passing the forceEncode parameter like so:

$ ./process-video --force
$ ./process-one --force /path/to/video-file.mkv

If an output file is not named to your liking try editing the filename and running:

$ ./names /path/to/video-file.mkv

which will output the destination subdirectory, filename, title and whether the file is determined to be a subtitle file or not. Once you are happy with the generated name, run ./process-video or ./process-one as normal to transcode the file.

Extra arguments appended to the end of the ./process-video, ./process-one or ./encode commands will be appended to the run FFmpeg command. So to include and title the first two existing subtitle tracks from every processed video you could run:

$ ./process-video -c:s copy -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a:0 -map 0:s:0 -map 0:s:1 -metadata:s:s:0 title="English" \
-metadata:s:s:0 language="en" -metadata:s:s:1 title='"English (cc)"' -metadata:s:s:1 language="en"

Note that due to shell word splitting and the way that FFmpeg receives arguments, strings containing spaces or other special characters must be double-quoted, as above.

Subtitles

Separate .srt files can be multiplexed into the output video file by placing them in the same directory as the input video file and naming them similarly.

Given the input file /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.mkv the subtitle file /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.English.srt would be multiplexed in with the subtitle track title "English" and the language code "en". English is the default title and language, so it's possible to name the subtitle file simply /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.srt.

An additional non-word character seperated string may be provided and will appear in the resultant title in parentheses, therefore the subtitle file /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.English.cc.srt would result in the title "English (cc)".

Setting the additional string to "forced" e.g. /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.English.forced.srt will result in the script attempting to force the corresponding subtitle track, meaning it will be displayed by default. FFmpeg does not currently have the capability to force MP4 subtitles so a patched version of FFmpeg must be used to access this functionality, source code for such a patched version of FFmpeg is available here: github.com/facefunk/FFmpeg

A third and final non-word character seperated string may be appended to the subtitle file name to set the language code of the corresponding subtitle track when the code in question is not the same as the first two letters of the title e.g. /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.Nederlands.forced.nl.srt, or /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.Nederlands..nl.srt where no additional string is required.

How subtitle files will be discovered and titled can be tested by running:

$ ./sub-names /src/Movies/A.Movie.2001.1080p.mkv