How to input a network file to ffmpeg

Question

My problem is this. I have access to a server that hosts many video files, most of them are very large and not well compressed. I intend to make a reduced quality smaller size copy of these on my local machine for better access.

The problem is that the server does not have ftp access. I can scp the files to my machine and then use ffmpeg to reduce the size, but I'll run out of space if I copy all of the files locally.

I am looking for a way to directly input a network file to ffmpeg, that way I'll be able to write a script that will overnight get me all the videos in reduced size.

Answer 1

You can use sshfs to make the remote files appear in a directory on the local machine.

You don't say what distro you're using on your client, but this is cribbed from the Ubuntu sshfs documentation:

1. Install the sshfs package (aptitude install sshfs)
2. Add your user to the fuse group (sudo gpasswd -a username fuse)
3. Mount the filesystem using the sshfs command

To use sshfs, make yourself a directory (we'll call this /mountpoint), and do

sshfs -o idmap=user remote_user@remote_server:/remote/directory /mountpoint

The remote files will now appear in /mountpoint, but are in fact still on the remote server. Any changes you make will be made remotely and not locally.

To unmount the directory, do

fusermount -u /mountpoint

Answer 2

If you have ssh access to the remote system, you could do something like

ssh server cat path/to/video | ffmpeg -i - [...]

The - causes ffmpeg to read from stdin instead of a file.

Caveat, though, not all formats support pipes. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12999674/ffmpeg-which-file-formats-support-stdin-usage