Life Skills, Nextcloud, Technology, Tutorial

How to Install Video Convertor App on Nextcloud

Someone complaining that they can’t view an Apple .MOV file on your Nextcloud server? No surprise considering ‘apple is apple’.

Heard about the cool app ‘Video Convertor’ for Nextcloud? Tried to install it and use it and got that ‘requires ffmpeg error?

Same.

Turns out it’s pretty easy to to get it going and here is how:

Let’s do it.

  1. ssh into your Nextcloud box. In my case it’s a nextcloudpi box if that matters…
  2. type this into the command line: sudo apt install ffmpeg
  3. Hit your enter key
  4. Wait a long time while a seriously large amount of stuff installs (and probably this is why it’s not installed by default)
  5. Go back to your video file in the Nextcloud in the browser user interface and note the three dots on the right side of the file name. Click that
  6. Select the video icon ‘convert into’
  7. Choose your options for speed and format
  8. Do it.
  9. Wait again (a lot of waiting here…)
  10. Create a new share of the newly created video file
  11. Test the file (good practice) by sending the share to yourself in a browser that you don’t use so you are seeing what your recipient will see without your login credentials affecting things.
  12. All good? Ship the new link to your recipient

Hope that helps

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5 thoughts on “How to Install Video Convertor App on Nextcloud

  1. Does not work, Installed ffmpeg and when trying to convert video I get the message
    ffmpeg is not installed or available DEBUG

  2. Hi

    I love the idea and I would like to extend functionality by automatically convert given folder contents – something like “watch folder”

    I would appreciate any help, hit me up

    1. Hey there. Since Nextcloud is one of the great open source projects out there, you can actually have your voice heard. This sounds like a cool idea and probably you aren’t alone. So what I would do is search somewhere in their github repository and learn how to file an ‘issue’ and then make sure it’s clearly marked as a ‘feature request’. You would need a github account but that’s a good thing to get anyways so that you can contribute to this and other open software projects (there are many). Otherwise you could pay a developer to build it and they could then upload it to the project and everyone could benefit… many ways to approach it. Hope some of these ideas help. Here is their repository: https://github.com/nextcloud

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