Alchemist

Intelligent video transcoding automation with hardware acceleration and CPU fallback

Alchemist is a Rust-based video transcoding system that automatically converts your media library to efficient AV1 format using hardware acceleration (GPU) or software encoding (CPU fallback).

Features

• Hardware Acceleration: Supports NVIDIA (NVENC), Intel (QSV), AMD (VAAPI), Apple (VideoToolbox)
• CPU Fallback: Automatic software encoding with libsvtav1 when GPU is unavailable
• Intelligent Analysis: Only transcodes files that will benefit from AV1 encoding
• Web Dashboard: Real-time monitoring and control via Axum/Askama/HTMX-based UI
• Single Binary: All assets and templates are embedded into the binary for easy deployment
• Background Processing: Queue-based system with concurrent job support
• Performance Metrics: Detailed logging and statistics for each transcode job
• HDR Handling: Preserve HDR metadata or tonemap to SDR for compatibility

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Rust: 1.75+
• FFmpeg: With hardware acceleration support and libsvtav1
• FFprobe: For media analysis

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/BrooklynLovesZelda/alchemist.git
cd alchemist

# Build the project
cargo build --release

# Run the server (default)
./target/release/alchemist

Docker Deployment

# Build the Docker image
docker build -t alchemist .

# Run the container
docker run -d \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v /path/to/media:/media \
  -v /path/to/output:/output \
  --name alchemist \
  alchemist

Access the web interface at http://localhost:3000

Configuration

Create a config.toml file in the working directory:

[transcode]
size_reduction_threshold = 0.3  # Require 30% size reduction
min_bpp_threshold = 0.1          # Minimum bits per pixel
min_file_size_mb = 50            # Skip files smaller than 50MB
concurrent_jobs = 2              # Number of parallel transcodes

[hardware]
allow_cpu_fallback = true        # Enable CPU encoding if no GPU
allow_cpu_encoding = true        # Allow software encoding
cpu_preset = "medium"            # CPU encoding speed: slow|medium|fast|faster

[scanner]
directories = [                  # Auto-scan directories
    "/media/movies",
    "/media/tvshows"
]

Supported Platforms

• Linux: x86_64 (Docker & Binary)
• Windows: x86_64
• macOS: x86_64 (Experimental)

Usage

CLI Mode

# Scan and transcode specific directories
alchemist --cli --dir /path/to/videos --dir /another/path

# Dry run (analyze only, don't transcode)
alchemist --cli --dry-run --dir /path/to/videos

Server Mode

# Start web server on default port (3000)
alchemist

Reset Auth

# Clear users/sessions and re-run setup
alchemist --reset-auth

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE file for details.