FFMPEG Alternative?

  • This is a great plugin but with the upcoming depreciation of FFMPEG (and it’s lack of support on some servers) is there any plan for a workaround to still allow thumbnail generation? Perhaps through use of a currently supported protocol that is similar to FFMPEG?

    Would be happy to pay for an additional license addon for this type of support.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Kyle Gilman

    (@kylegilman)

    It’s news to me that FFMPEG is being deprecated. That would be a huge loss for the video community. Where did you hear that? I know if you ran early versions of the FFMPEG-forked project LIBAV using an ffmpeg command, it would give a warning that the ffmpeg command was deprecated and that you should use avconv instead. But that was just letting you know you should switch commands, not that the FFMPEG was deprecated, and LIBAV has been a dead project for many years. I’m planning to remove support for it eventually.

    However, you don’t need FFMPEG for thumbnail generation. I came up with a workaround about 9 years ago by using your browser’s built-in video decoding capabilities. The one missing feature is automatic thumbnail creation when videos are uploaded. I hope to tackle that some day, but it will require opening up the admin area of WordPress in order to do it, so it’s not as hands-off as the current FFMPEG method.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Kyle Gilman.
    Thread Starter terrorem

    (@terrorem)

    I am sorry, I totally misread this email from my host – the relevant portion of which is included below.

    “The PHP-FFmpeg project has not been renewed for the last few years and is not compatible with the RHEL 8 based systems. Since code for alt-PHP-FFmpeg is outdated and FFmpeg has a lot of third-party dependencies, this module is not available for CloudLinux OS Shared 8.”

    In any event I am back on a CentOS 7 server with FFMPEG installed until my host phases them out. Prior to migrating back to the CentOS server I was having issues with thumbnails not generating even in my browser. I would get a “media not accessable” or something to that effect error.

    Perhaps this would be better discussed via e-mail but this capability is mission-critical for my website and I would love to find a long-term solution.

    Thanks so much in advance!

    Plugin Author Kyle Gilman

    (@kylegilman)

    Ah. There are a lot of confusing terms involved with FFMPEG. I’ll try to clear it up as much as I can.

    What Videopack requires is access to the FFMPEG binary on your server and a PHP configuration that allows executing files via proc_open. I used to run Centos 7 on my server but I switched to RHEL-compatible Rocky Linux 8 about a year ago and I haven’t had any trouble with it and I can’t think of a reason why it would work differently on 8 vs 7. You can install FFMPEG using your server’s package manager.

    There was a PHP module/extension called FFMPEG-PHP that hasn’t been updated since 2007. In order to use it you (or your host) would have to install and configure it with your server’s PHP installation. Back when I started building this plugin in 2010, it seemed too outdated to use and I have never required it. As far as I know, there is no way you could even use it with Videopack.

    There is also a PHP library called PHP-FFMPEG which is actively maintained and seems great. It didn’t exist yet when I started Videopack and I would love to integrate it some day so I can just not worry about most of the finicky stuff about FFMPEG. If I used it, it would be installed along with the Videopack files and you wouldn’t notice it. One roadblock is that it requires the FFPROBE binary in addition to FFMPEG, and I don’t want to make it even harder to get this working.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Kyle Gilman.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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