This is a collection of tools and utilities for processing media files and managing media libraries. It strives to follow the Unix philosophy of DOTADIW, "Do One Thing And Do It Well." The goal is to break the necessary work down into tasks that are as discrete as possible so that they can be composed variously to serve different environments and workloads. Examples of different ways to compose these tools may be provided but are not the only way to do it. Just some of the many benefits of this approach are:

• easier to execute steps in parallel for faster execution
• easier to execute individual steps when they fail in special cases

Until there's a clear reason not to, workflows will be supported by composing these utilities in process pipelines using |. The stdin for each utility should accept one media file per line/NULL, and each utility should output the next relevant media file one per line/NULL.

When managing a media library, there are different phases that media progress through leading to full integration into the library:

Acquisition:

new media to be integrated into the library

Processing:

processing newly acquired media into an acceptable form for integrating the into library

Integration:

adding processed media into the library to make it available to consumers

Newly acquired media may have a number of issues making it unacceptable for integrating into the library. It may be in a format unsupported by the library software. It may be in a format that is in some way sub-optimal. It may be poorly named leading to mis-identification my the library software. Etc..

The processing tools here support the following workflow, but may be composed differently to accommodate different workflows:

1. Extract Archives

   Extract media from compressed archives (e.g. *.rar, *.zip, *.tar.gz) as needed. Media formats are already highly compressed so such formats have no benefit and cause many issues with library and player software. This is well covered by existing utilities, so this goal is accomplished by integrating those utilities into the pipeline/workflow.

2. Convert

   Convert newly acquired media to optimal formats including:

   • remux into the optimal container format
   • transcode streams to optimal codecs, both video and audio

   Since conversion may require lots of computational power, optimization is important here. These are done in one step/tool in an exception to DOTADIW because it's much more efficient to do in one step, e.g. because ffmpeg can do them at once.

   Similarly, the utility for this step strives to optimize the processing as much as possible, e.g. using ffmpeg hardware acceleration based on what hardware is available. For many media libraries, completeness is more important that optimization, so if an optimized conversion fails, the conversion will be attempted again without optimization.

3. Tag

   Embed metadata into tags per the format.

4. Optimize

   Perform other optimizations, e.g. placement of the MOOV atom for quickstart.