DASH Converter

DASH Converter is a Node.js tool to automate the encoding of multi-bitrate media for DASH delivery. Based on this guide by Jonas Sandberg of Codemill.

Installation and Usage

To use DASH Converter as a command line tool, make sure Node.js and mp4box are installed on your machine. FFmpeg and FFprobe binaries are provided automatically.

Install globally with NPM:

$ npm install -g dash-converter

Create a new directory to store the files ./input and ./output folders, and optionally a config.json file to configure your desired output formats. If you don't create one, a default one will be created when the converter is run. See the configuration section for details on configuration options.

When ready, place all of your source video files into ./input and run the following command:

$ dash-converter

DASH Converter will process every video file in the ./input folder into an MPEG-DASH compatible format and store the results in ./output.

For experimental NVENC hardware acceleration you can pass the -hwaccel flag:

$ dash-converter -hwaccel

Building locally

Clone this repo and use npm install to install dependencies:

$ git clone https://github.com/JeffSchofield/dash-converter.git
$ cd dash-converter
$ npm install

Build the project with NPM:

$ npm run build

Use NPM link to make your local DASH Converter available to the command line:

$ npm link
$ dash-converter

Programmatic Usage

You can integrate the converter into your Node.js application by installing and importing the DASH Converter lib:

$ npm install dash-converter

Example:

import { DASHConverter } from 'dash-converter'

async function init() {
	const dash = new DASHConverter({
		video_formats: [
			{ name: '1080p', args: {} }
		],
		audio_formats: [
			{ name: '', args: {} }
		]
	})

	let result = await dash.convert('./some_source_video.mp4', './output_folder')
}

Configuration

DASH Converter will create a default config.json file for you when first run. Alter this file to specify video and audio formats to be transcoded.

default_audio_args

• Type: FFmpegAudioArgs

• Default: { 'c:a': 'aac', 'b:a': '192k', 'vn': undefined }

  Arguments that are always passed to FFmpeg during audio transcode.

default_video_args

• Type: FFmpegVideoArgs

• Default: { 'c:v': 'libx264', 'profile:v': 'main', 'crf': 23, 'preset': "slow", 'pix_fmt': "yuv420p", 'an': undefined }

  Arguments that are always passed to FFmpeg during video transcode.

audio_formats

• Type: FFmpegAudioFormat[]

  List of audio formats to be transcoded to. Each format contains a name and a list of arguments to pass to FFMpeg in this shape: { name:string, args:FFmpegAudioArgs }

video_formats

• Type: FFmpegVideoFormat[]

  List of video formats to be transcoded to. Each format contains a name and a list of arguments to pass to FFMpeg in this shape: { name:string, args:FFmpegVideoArgs }

License

DASH Converter is MIT licensed.