Media Archon

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Table of Contents

• Installation
• License

Installation

pip install media-archon

Copy the config file media-archon.toml from the repository into the top level of the directory tree of media you wish to convert and edit to meet your needs.

Theory

Media archon is an aggressively multithreaded Linux/Unix/MacOSX tool designed to mirror a tree of source media files to a destination tree, converting matching media using any command line tool selected by the user. It has been designed and tested around using the excellent fre:ac opensource audio software to convert existing MP3 audiobooks etc. into Opus files for unbeatable size vs. quality.

When executed with media-archon /directory/of/media/files/, it will:

1. Look for and read the /directory/of/media/files/media-archon.toml.
2. Attempt to discover how many threads can execute in parallel on the host (THREADS).
3. Create two threadpools, one light with 10*THREADS threads for exploring directories and copying, and one heavy of 1*THREADS threads for conversions or other CPU heavy tasks. (The numbers of threads can be overridden in the configuration file.)

After configuring itself a light walker thread will be scheduled on the light threadpool to walk /directory/of/media/files/. The thread will:

1. Iterate through the objects in the directory looking for a configuration override file (default media-archon-override.toml). If found it will update its converter parameters for this directory and all its subdirectories.
2. Loop through the objects again and depending on whether it is a directory or a file with a particular extension (e.g. .mp3):
   1. If a directory, schedule a new walker light thread to search the subdirectory in parallel.
   2. If a file on the ignore list (.*) ignore.
   3. If a file with an extension in the copy list, and one or more of the following conditions are met schedule a light thread to copy it to the target:
      1. The media-archon.toml mtime is newer than the target mtime
      2. Any media-archon-override.toml mtime in the current or parent directory is newer than the target
      3. The source file mtime is newer than the target mtime
   4. If a file with an extension in the convert list, and one or more of the following conditions are met schedule a heavy thread to convert it from the source to the target using the supplied command line in the config.
      1. The media-archon.toml mtime is newer than the target mtime
      2. Any media-archon-override.toml mtime in the current or parent directory is newer than the target
      3. The source file mtime is newer than the target mtime
3. Schedule light threads to delete files and directories in the target that are not in the source.

License

media-archon is distributed under the terms of the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.