r/ffmpeg

I run a photo shop and we also shoot weddings, around 8 - 16 avg. a month right now.

I’ve been thinking about adding something new where we put QR codes on the tables and guests can just scan them and upload whatever photos/videos they take during the wedding.

The idea is that it’s not only for the couple. Everyone can get access after, so you might find some random video of yourself dancing or a photo someone took from another table that normally would just stay on their phone forever.

I’m trying to figure out the technical side before actually building it. Photos seem pretty easy, but video looks like it can become a mess pretty fast because we have no control over what phones people use. Could be iPhone HDR, HEVC, H264, 4K, different frame rates etc. And with 8 - 16 weddings a month it could easily turn into thousands of videos.

Has anyone here built something that deals with this kind of video volume? How are you handling transcoding? Just running FFmpeg workers yourself or using some API/service?

Also curious what actually becomes the biggest pain when it scales is it cost, speed, storage, weird formats, HDR, or something else?

Hello

I've got a rather large video file and the video is H264/AVC its has multiple subs, audio tracks, etc.

I know I can copy the various tracks using the -map function, but is there a way to simply re-encode the video from h264 to h265 with just a simpler command line?

I know how to handle the video side of it, bitrate, etc. But its the chapter markers, audio tracks, etc. that I want as is.

Thanks

I have a video file from a surveillance camera. It's in AVI format and FFPROBE says thus about it:

X:\filez>ffprobe -analyzeduration 2147483647 -probesize 2147483647 cam4.avi
ffprobe version N-127054-g9d3f0f2c58-20261001 Copyright (c) 2007-2026 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 16.2.0 (crosstool-NG 1.29.0.7_b1a94f6)
  configuration: --prefix=/ffbuild/prefix --pkg-config-flags=--static --pkg-config=pkg-config --cross-prefix=x86_64-w64-mingw32- --arch=x86_64 --target-os=mingw32 --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --disable-debug --enable-shared --disable-static --disable-w32threads --enable-pthreads --enable-iconv --enable-zlib --enable-libxml2 --enable-libvmaf --disable-libxcb --disable-xlib --enable-fontconfig --enable-libharfbuzz --enable-libfreetype --enable-libfribidi --enable-vulkan --enable-libdav1d --enable-libvorbis --enable-librav1e --enable-librsvg --disable-libpulse --enable-gmp --enable-lzma --enable-liblcevc-dec --enable-opencl --enable-amf --enable-libaom --enable-avisynth --enable-chromaprint --enable-libdavs2 --enable-libdvdread --enable-libdvdnav --disable-libfdk-aac --enable-ffnvcodec --enable-cuda-llvm --enable-frei0r --enable-libgme --enable-libkvazaar --enable-libaribb24 --enable-libaribcaption --enable-libass --enable-libbluray --enable-libcurl --enable-libjxl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libplacebo --enable-librist --enable-libssh --enable-libtheora --enable-libvpx --enable-libwebp --enable-libzmq --enable-lv2 --enable-libvpl --enable-openal --enable-liboapv --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopenh264 --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libopenmpt --enable-librubberband --enable-schannel --enable-sdl2 --enable-libsnappy --enable-libsoxr --enable-libsrt --enable-libsvtav1 --enable-libtwolame --enable-libuavs3d --disable-libdrm --enable-vaapi --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvvenc --disable-whisper --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxavs2 --enable-libxvid --enable-libzimg --enable-libzvbi --extra-cflags=-DLIBTWOLAME_STATIC --extra-cxxflags= --extra-libs=-lgomp --extra-ldflags=-pthread --extra-ldexeflags= --cc=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc --cxx=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ --ar=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ar --ranlib=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-ranlib --nm=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-nm --extra-version=20261001
  libavutil      61. 10.100 / 61. 10.100
  libavcodec     63. 15.100 / 63. 15.100
  libavformat    63.  7.100 / 63.  7.100
  libavdevice    63.  2.100 / 63.  2.100
  libavfilter    12.  4.100 / 12.  4.100
  libswscale     10.  2.100 / 10.  2.100
  libswresample   7.  3.101 /  7.  3.101
[avi @ 0000025fa9446700] non-interleaved AVI
[avi @ 0000025fa9446700] probed stream 1 failed
[avi @ 0000025fa9446700] Could not find codec parameters for stream 1 (Subtitle: none): unknown codec
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' (2147483647) and 'probesize' (2147483647) options
Input #0, avi, from 'cam4.avi':
  Duration: 63:36:11.45, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 87 kb/s
  Stream #0:0: Video: cinepak (cvid / 0x64697663), rgb24, 384x288, 100 fps, 100 tbr, 100 tbn
    Metadata:
      title           : ITV Video
  Stream #0:1: Subtitle: none
    Metadata:
      title           : ITV Text
Unsupported codec with id 0 for input stream 1

I tried to dump it to a separate text file with the following command:

X:\filez>ffmpeg -i cam4.avi -map 0:1 -c copy -copy_unknown -f data wtf2.txt

And what I got was a text file with one veeeery long line in Windows-1251 encoding that goes like:

Камера [4] 30-06-26 16:59:17.000 Камера [4] 30-06-26 16:59:17.100 Камера [4] 30-06-26 16:59:17.200 Камера [4] 30-06-26 16:59:17.30

And so on and so forth. For those that don't know "Камера" means "Camera", just in Russian. This is not surprising, since the Russian language is quite widespread in my country (Latvia), and a configuring a surveillance camera to use it wouldn't be unusual.

So, as far as I can tell, the "codec" is just a small piece of text with the timestamp for every frame of video. Unfortunately ffmpeg does not understand this, and neither does VLC. The AVI file needs some love and care anyway (it's missing an index), and since I'm already mucking around with it, I'd like to bring the subtitles back as well.

Short of writing my own script that would translate this stream of consciousness into a recognizable subtitle format (probably not that difficult, but still) is there anything else that I could tell ffmpeg to start recognizing it?