Background

As I have certain older hardware or finicky software, I was more forced to convert my video files to a better format. It either was subtitles not showing up, audio track being wrong, or not being to play at all. My first solution was to use Handbrake, which works fine for occasional transcoding, but is bothersome on tens or even hundreds of files, leaving my desktop up all night and day. I then moved it to my server, but it occasionally crashed, and I still needed to do all the config manually for each video.

I then concluded that while some services have converting included, some are not good doing so, and I’m not fond of on-the-fly, I started investigating of implementing a batch converter with ffmpeg.