Output Location & Network Drive (help request)

[bercaw]

When I stumbled upon the transcode-video tool, I was so inspired that I've been doing my best to learn CLI & bash. So far I've made good progress & I'm able to transcode mkvs on my desktop. I'm trying to take this to the next level and transcode files located on my NAS & output the new file to another folder on my NAS, but I keep getting an error that there's no such file or directory. I get this error even when I start the process by entering the bash command in the file explorer bar in either of the NAS folders. Apologies if this is the wrong place to post, I wasn't able to find a Q&A section for dummies.

Btw, the transcode-video tool is magic - I'm incredibly thankful to have found it!

[damorrison]

Hi, I'll jump in with a few questions first that the collective hive mind would find useful to know how to help.

• Firstly, are you using Linux or a Mac, or perhaps WSL on Windows?
• Have you mapped the drives so you can view them in a terminal/command window? i.e. can you do an ls on the volume where the files are?
• Can you post the exact error message you're getting, and perhaps the script you've written?

Some other thoughts:

• transcoding from a NAS to a NAS via another device will be a lot slower than transcoding them locally, i.e. copying the files to a local drive or perhaps an external USB3 drive first.
• Don has written a new tool, called other-transcode which makes use of the hardware encoders available in most modern graphics cards, or Intel processors. You might want to check that out if you have a supported device as it allows for very fast transcoding, even with HEVC. You can find the new project here: https://github.com/donmelton/other_video_transcoding

[lisamelton]

@bercaw Sorry I took so long to reply. But many thanks to @damorrison for stepping in while I was away sleeping!

Thank you for using my transcode-video tool. I'm glad you discovered it.

As to why you're getting that error when transcoding, I'm afraid I don't have quite enough information to diagnose it. But let me give a few suggestions since you appear to be new to the command line.

It's best to simply open a command line session in a separate window so it can be used interactively. Hopefully this is a Bash or PowerShell command line.

If so, use the cd command to change to the directory where you want your output to go. This is because transcode-video produces all its output in the current directory by default. So if you change the current directory (again, with the cd command) then you'll get that output exactly where you want.

That way you can specify which file you wish to transcode by using a full path to that file. On Windows that would be something like:

transcode-video "C:\path\to\Movie.mkv"

Obviously your full path to your original file would be very different. But hopefully you get the right idea here.

Does that help answer your question? Or have I misinterpreted you?

[Stooovie]

Can I change the output path to be always the original path (the path to original file), so I can have the outputs right next to the inputs? That would be my preferred way but I don't know how to do that. I'm on Mac. Thanks!

[lisamelton]

@Stooovie Yes, but you should never do that. This is because the output path name would likely be the same as the input path name and I prevent you from overwriting your original.

Please, never write to the same directory as your original files. This is how horrible data loss accidents happen.