Question

I have three computers on my LAN,

one running ubuntu,
one running openSuse
and my server running Archlinux.

I’ve only managed to get ffmpeg to work properly on my server.

I would like to write a script that would pretend to be an ffmpeg installation on the local machine, but would actually just be using the server’s ffmpeg.

Example:

on the openSuse pc i would like to call:

ffmpeg -i file.avi out.flv

and then get the normal output as one would expect,
but I want it to use the ffmpeg on the archlinux.

any advice as to how I would get this to work.
( preferably in Ruby )

EDIT: I’ve extended this question to How do I display progress bars from a shell command over ssh

Answer 1

I don’t have a lot of ruby-fu, but this seems to work!

Prerequisites,

sudo yum install rubygems
sudo gem install net-ssh net-sftp highline echoe

Code (with comments),

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'net/ssh'
require 'net/sftp'
require 'highline/import'

file = ARGV[ 0 ]                  # filename from command line
prod = file + "-new"              # product filename (call it <file>-new)
rpath = "/tmp"                    # remote computer operating directory
rfile = "#{rpath}/#{file}"        # remote filename
rprod = "#{rpath}/#{prod}"        # remote product
cmd  = "mv #{rfile} #{rprod}"     # remote command, constructed

host = "-YOUR REMOTE HOST-"
user = "-YOUR REMOTE USERNAME-"
pass = ask("Password: ") { |q| q.echo = false }  # password from stdin

Net::SSH.start(host, user, :password => pass) do |ssh|
        ssh.sftp.connect do |sftp|
                # upload local 'file' to remote 'rfile'
                sftp.upload!(file, rfile)

                # run remote command 'cmd' to produce 'rprod'
                ssh.exec!(cmd)

                # download remote 'rprod' to local 'prod'
                sftp.download!(rprod, prod)
        end
end

And then I can run this like so,

dylan@home ~/tmp/ruby) ls
bar  remotefoo.rb*
dylan@home ~/tmp/ruby) ./remotefoo.rb bar
Password: 
dylan@home ~/tmp/ruby) ls
bar  bar-new  remotefoo.rb*