In the Province of Québec tabarnak is a swear derived from the tabernacle but it is an acronym for:

Transcoder All Basically Accessible Resolutely Not All Klingon

Le tact dans l'audace, c'est de savoir jusqu'où on peut aller trop loin.

Jean Cocteau

This script is used to convert video or audio media files to modern codecs such as HEVC, VP9, AV1 (experimental) or Opus. It walks into a directory and probes media files for video or audio that are not encoded with specified codec (default HEVC). Then it transcodes them. The idea is to use a more modern codec that has a better quality/bitrate ratio. Resulting files are significantly smaller than original h264, mpeg2, mpeg4 or likely any other formats that they are currently encoded to.

tabarnak uses crf encoding. All channels are copied. The audio is converted by ffmpeg to ogg vorbis by default.

tabarnak won’t delete or clean up your files. It will skip files that are already done. Basic sanity check is performed after encoding and it will print a warning if the input and output size do not match.

If you plan to use your media files with a chrome cast, be sure the buy chromecast ultra since the 3rd generation chromecast does not support HEVC.

• Easy to use out of the box
  • input & output directory support
  • keep relative path option for transcoding entire hierarchy of media files
  • copy your metadata (default) or not
• Basic default configuration for basic codecs such as h264, hevc, vp9 & opus
• Custom configuration workflow using either json or yaml
• Configurable logging including basic prometheus support
• Transcoder stats output (yaml)
• Automatic tests

pip3 install tabarnak-desjare

For help: tabarnak -h

tabarnak --input-dir . --output-dir output --h264

tabarnak --copy --opus --keep-relative-path --map-args "-map 0:0 " --output-dir your_output_dir

Note that the mapping argument is necessary since iTunes files may contain unwanted tracks that prevent files to be recognised by music players.

• python3 (tested with python 3.7 and 3.8)
• ffmpeg in your path

I prepared a tutorial video to learn how to do that on Windows 10: https://gist.github.com/desjare/adc1514d46bcb38414a5e2a602f6d12d