It might be as simple as file access rights, but I didn't do much debugging) sudo ffmpeg -i amovie.mp4 $(cat ffmpegoptions.txt) convertedmovie.mp4 Use an external options file for ffmpeg (which I can get to work from the console, but not as part of the pipe, e.g. The three options I see for above (as to date I have found no way for choosing an external transcoder option for tvheadend, without moving into weird builds, which I would like to avoid) are:

So I don't fully understand all the aspects of 'pipe'. Now I am happy to say I am not a Ubuntu expert (not even close), although I have been running my own home servers for a few years now. (This is all happening on an up to date Ubuntu server). So what I want to do is wrap ffmpeg in something, so I can change the wrapper. This all works, BUT if I want to change the settings in the above pipe, I have to change them for all links (which I do through a script), but that means tvheadend re-imports and tests all the links (as it see them as changed links, which is fair enough).

to pipe:///usr/bin/ffmpeg -loglevel fatal -i -tune zerolatency -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 28 -maxrate 1200k -bufsize 3500k -vf 'scale='min(1280,iw)':'min(720,ih)'' -acodec aac -b:a 128K -f mpegts pipe:1 So in tvheadend the http link goes from something like (I am having to transcode because of limited player abilities)

I am using tvheadend, and the inbuilt transcoder murders my CPU, and provides average quality output (it's powered by ffmpeg), if I pipe the output from tvheadend through ffmpeg I get much lower CPU usage and better quality (weird but true).

Pipe ffmpeg python