I would like my videos to be ready to be moved to mobile devices when I want to travel, and things like Plex take too long for my liking. However I also prefer retaining the original full quality videos.

I wrote a Bash script (intended to be run as a cron job) that watches a directory for new files, and converts them to a ~3GB file with ffmpeg and dumps them in a destination directory.

There’s still a few bugs to work out but it’s functional. It’s available at https://github.com/eldridgea/Transmute.

Update: sigh . . . Plex decided to make this a built in feature of Plex. I’m going to at least maintain Transmute for a little while in case I ever decide to switch to Emby.

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/techy2610/6978815038