Open-source video transcoding with Handbrake

This guide will show you how to deploy HandBrake, an open-source video transcoder, to metalstack.cloud.

Setup

You can install it with our basic Helm chart, which is based on this container image. You can find the installation instructions for Helm in the official documentation. Once you have installed Helm run kubectl cluster-info to find out your cluster’s host name. The output should look similar to this:

Kubernetes control plane is running at https://api.handbrake.f8e67080ba.k8s.metalstackcloud.io
CoreDNS is running at https://api.handbrake.f8e67080ba.k8s.metalstackcloud.io/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

Here, the part that comes after https://api. is the relevant part. You can set an environment variable for it like so export HOSTNAME=handbrake.f8e67080ba.k8s.metalstackcloud.io. It will look different for you.

Next, add the handbrake and ingress-nginx Helm repositories and install.

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx \
helm install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
  --version 4.9.1 \
  --namespace ingress-nginx \
  --create-namespace \
helm repo add handbrake https://iljarotar.github.io/handbrake-helm-charts/docs \
helm install handbrake handbrake/handbrake \
  --set clusterName=demo.$HOSTNAME

If everything worked out, you should be able to access HandBrake under https://demo.<your-host-name>.
It can take some time till the url is accessible.

Converting Videos Automatically

To convert videos with HandBrake, you need to upload them either to the storage directory or to the watch directory. The storage directory can be accessed from within the UI. The converted videos will be put into the output directory, from where you can download them. To automate the conversion, you can upload videos to the watch directory. HandBrake then automatically starts converting the videos from the watch directory using the preset you specified with the AUTOMATED_CONVERSION_PRESET environment variable. This way, you don’t even need to enter the UI.

To share files between your local computer and HandBrake, you can use the kubectl cp command. First, find out the name of your HandBrake Pod.

kubectl get pod

NAME                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
handbrake-7c5cdbcd85-j9qnj   1/1     Running   0          7m40s

You could put some videos into an example directory called videos and run:

kubectl cp videos handbrake-7c5cdbcd85-j9qnj:/storage

The files should appear in the file browser if you click the Open Source Button in the UI.

If you want to work without the UI run:

kubectl cp videos handbrake-7c5cdbcd85-j9qnj:/watch

After a while, HandBrake should be finished with converting the videos and you can copy them from the Pod’s output directory into your local output directory.

kubectl cp handbrake-7c5cdbcd85-j9qnj:/output output \
ls output

example-vid.mp4