Subsonic Forum

Hello all,

I'm having a bit of trouble getting transcoding going. I have a script in SUBSONIC_HOME/transcode that calls ffmpeg. I have set the transcode settings to use this script for every audio file type and enabled transcoding for all players. However, the log file shows that transcoding never starts even when the file isn't an mp3 or exceeds the max bitrate I set.

I thought the issue might be ffmpeg needing to be in SUBSONIC_HOME/transcode so I moved it in there. This made no difference. Furthermore, I noticed that subsonic was saying I didn't have LAME installed, so I copied this to the transcode folder to see if i could get rid of the message. However, subsonic still says I don't have it installed.
Thanks for any help!

Need to give a little more information to figure this out.
First, I am assuming you are running under linux although its not much different under Windows.

Have you tried entering the transcoding steps manually from the transcode directory at shell? (what did you type and what did it return?)
Did you check the run permission on ffmpeg?
Does anything show up in the subsonic log when you click to play a file?

Hi jeremyh, thanks for your reply.

I am under linux, using a script someone kindly provided on here(any2mp3) with the following:
----
#!/bin/bash
song=$1
bitrate=$2

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i "$song" -ab $bitrate -f mp3 - 2>/dev/null
----
which seems to run fine if i call it myself from a terminal.
Both ffmpeg, lame and any2mp3 have executable permissions, so it is strange that subsonic reports that LAME is not installed.

If I try to stream a file that should be transcoded, the log simply shows that subsonic initialised the stream, there is no mention of any attempt to transcode either from .flac -> .mp3 or from high bitrate to low bitrate.

N.B. It seems my ffmpeg build does not have lame enabled, so I'll work on that now. However, subsonic is still being funny about LAME and logs don't show any attempt to transcode...

I did have some issues with ffmpeg when I was originally setting up the transcoding options. If I tried to pipe the output to standard out, it would fail, but if I piped it to a file everything worked fine. (I think there was a bug or a restriction with sending output to standard out). I had to load libavcodec-unstripped instead of the default to get it working. (see http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... highlight=)

As a side note, I placed a symbolic link to LAME in the transcode folder (along with links to faad, ffmpeg, flac, mppdec, oggdec)

Also, for flac, I am using "flac -c -s -d %s" for step 1, then "lame -b %b - -" for step 2. (not ffmpeg).

here is my log output when I play a flac file (I am not sure if we messed with the logging settings to have it show debug - we might have):
[10/8/09 10:12:07 AM MDT] INFO PlaylistInputStream jeremyh listening to "Stone Cold Rhymin'/03 - Bust a Move.flac"
[10/8/09 10:12:07 AM MDT] DEBUG TranscodeInputStream Starting transcoder: [/var/subsonic/transcode/flac] [-c] [-s] [-d] [/multimedia/Audio/Music/Young MC/Stone Cold Rhymin'/03 - Bust a Move.flac]
[10/8/09 10:12:07 AM MDT] DEBUG TranscodeInputStream Starting transcoder: [/var/subsonic/transcode/lame] [-b] [128] [-] [-]

Also, I am not sure if you saw my original post either - it has my settings for the transcoding and may save you some time:

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... highlight=