Tdarr - The new standard in footage ingest?

[Spontaneocus]

Im in Scotland and the reason I preface this article with that statement is because here the law on copyright isnt too bad. If you buy a DVD or other disk and you copy it, then it is not illegal, so long as the copy is for your own backup purposes. For many years I have bought new DVD's (and while some might laugh at that now with streaming etc, there is just something about a wall of DVDs on a rack) and copied them, then used the copy as the one to watch and put the original back in the box and stored away just incase. That way if the copy gets scratched, no big deal, I just make another one to watch.

 

However, having two racks of DVDs has become extremely clumbersome so a while ago I  constructing a rack mounted plex server just to fiddle arround and see if I could get it to do a chain of things in unraid for a number of different things. One of these was copying the files from the DVD to an ingest folder for it then to be converted into H264 for the purposes of compression and a more conducive format for playback across the network. 

 

I stumbled across the Tdarr project which was in pre-alpha at the time (big shout out to HaveAGitGat) https://github.com/HaveAGitGat/Tdarr

 

Now Tdarr runs on pretty much every OS, but it also has a docker version which runs on unraid.

 

In a nutshell, it watches folders you designated for new footage, then uses handbrake or FFPEG to convert to H264, H265 (which I am now using on my new plex server finished yesterday) and it really is as simple as drop and go with the files.

 

With the recent introduction in plugins, it means that you can specify different folders, different plugins etc. There are also features for setting schedules, allocated resources to it etc etc.

 

Tdarr was obviously designed for home video conversion etc and its still in active development at alpha leve, but from what I can see, this could be an absolutely MASSIVE programme for not just footage ingest for content creators, but also the post editing conversion for all of the different upload platforms. On that basis, I think it would be really cool to try and spread the word and maybe get the LTT community to trial the software, help HaveAGitGat develop it and of course, perhaps get a few interested people from the forums assisting with its active development.