alt Hacker NewsHi HN!
I'm excited to show case an update to a personal project of mine. Its called ffmpeg-over-ip and it allows you connect to remote ffmpeg servers, so if you have one machine with a GPU (could be your windows gaming laptop, gaming PC, a macbook?) and a machine (or VM, docker container etc) without a GPU, you could use the remote GPU to do GPU-accelerated video conversion.
The way it works is pretty neat, there are two components, a server and a client.
- The server (has the GPU) comes with a patched up ffmpeg and listens on a specified port - The client (without the GPU) connects to the server, takes the file IO requests from the server and runs them locally.
ffmpeg doesn't know that its not dealing with a local filesystem, so this approach works with multiple inputs or outputs like HLS, and is perfect for home media servers like Plex or Jellyfin or Emby.
One server can offer up its GPU to as many clients as needed, all clients offer up their own filesystems for their requests, the server also comes with a static build of ffmpeg bundled (built from jellyfin-ffmpeg scripts) so all you have to do is create a config file, set a password and you're good to go!
It's been about a year and half since this was last submitted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743780). The feedback at the time was around the difficulty of sharing a filesystem between the machines so that should no longer be a problem.
This has been really useful in my local setup, I hope you find it useful. If you have any further questions, the website has some FAQs (linked in github repo), or you could post them here and I'll answer them for you!
Thanks!
Replies
Nice to see you here!
Was really impressed by your work on Pundle. (It was an amazingly fast HMR dev environment - much like Vite today.) Felt like I was the only one using it, but it was hard to walk away from instant updates.
cool idea. can you elaborate on IO and how the ffmpeg-server reads blocks from the client? that would seem to be a big blocker
Since we're on the homepage, please forgive my shameless plug: https://github.com/steelbrain/LemurCam
I built this macOS app that allows you to use any off the shelf wifi camera as your webcam with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. It has lower latency than OBS, VLC etc based on my testing, its Swift-Native and pretty lightweight.
It was built mainly for my own team so they don't have to run long wires of USB cameras or pay a lot of money for a "wireless webcam". I hope you find it useful!