Beginner's Guide

This is the beginner's keep-it-stupid-simple guide.

This guide will help get users who have never done any kind of video encoding and have never worked with ffmpeg up to speed. In this guide you will learn how to use NMMES-cli just enough to provide a foundation for more advanced topic that you can learn on your own.

Chapter 1: Installation

In order to use NMMES-cli you will first need to install a few dependencies. These dependencies are NodeJS, NPM, and ffmpeg. If you are using linux I suggest installing these dependencies from a repository instead of downloading it yourself. First download and install NodeJS and NPM from the Node.JS website, they come as a combined package from Node.JS so there is no need to download and install 2 separate packages.

Installing ffmpeg is a little more tricky for Windows users, visit the ffmpeg website and download a compressed folder containing the ffmpeg executables. You need to place these executables in C:\Windows\System32 on Windows and /usr/bin on Linux. Next you should be able to open a fresh command prompt/terminal and be able to see some output when entering the ffmpeg -version command. If you get a ffmpeg not found type error message then you did something wrong.

Now we can install NMMES-cli. Open a command prompt/terminal with admin/root permissions and run npm install --global nmmes-cli. If you didn't get any error messages then NMMES-cli has been installed successfully.

We can run the nmmes --version command to ensure nmmes-cli is installed correctly.

In order to run nmmes without any advanced options we will need to also install the default modules: nmmes-module-normalize and nmmes-module-encoder. Run npm install --global nmmes-module-normalize nmmes-module-encoder to install both of these modules. You can find out more about these modules from their respective npm pages at nmmes-module-normalize and nmmes-module-encoder.

Chapter 2: Usage

Lets say we have a video file that we want to convert located at C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\new-video.mp4 (If you are using Linux I am assuming you can convert Window's directory structure to Linux's yourself). If we want to simply normalize and encode the video with NMMES-cli's default settings we can run nmmes C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\new-video.mp4 -d C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\encoded-videos. The -d option specifies the folder where encoded files should be placed. Once the encoder finishes you should have a new video located at C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\encoded-videos\new-video.mkv

Next: Learn about Modules