H.264 to H.265 transcoder

To be clear, this tool doesn't solve a new problem. Maybe you have some video files that use the H.264 format and you need/want to convert those files to H.265 for <foo reason>. There are a number of alternatives out there! To name only a few...

• Tdarr
• Handbrake
• FFmpeg

In fact, these tools all utilize FFmpeg under the hood, aiming themselves at being very powerful and capable of serving many use cases. What makes h264_to_h265 transcoder different is that it focuses on doing just one thing - converting video files that use the H.264 format to H.265. No more, no less!

Installation

1. $ git clone https://github.com/apesch85/h264_to_h265.git
2. $ python3 -m venv h264_to_h265
3. $ source h264_to_h265/bin/activate
4. $ pip install -r h264_to_h265/requirements.txt

Usage

Because this tool does just one thing, usage is very simplified. No web front-ends to install, configure, and maintain! There are just 3 settings for you to configure at the time you run the tool -

• Number of concurrent transcoding jobs

  ---

  Note: H.265 transcoding is very CPU intensive! It is recommended to keep this number low. For example, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X handles 3 threads really well. 4 is slightly too many.

  ---

• The path to the video files

• The path to the csv file tracking the status of the transcoding jobs

These configuration settings are set with command line flags. Example usage below.

First, navigate to the directory that is the git repo -

 
$ source bin/activate
$ python3 transcoder.py \
  --db_path=/home/user/vid_db.csv \
  --video_dir=/mnt/videos \
  --num_threads=3

To see details about these flags while using the tool, you can run -

$ python3 transcoder.py --help