QNAP Using FFmpeg for AC/3 in TV Recordings Conversion

If you run an HDHomeRun DVR on a QNAP Device, you may have noticed the built in transcoder doesn’t work on your recordings. The version of FFmpeg installed on QNAP through CodexPack doesn’t support AC/3 audio transcoding, which is what most TV broadcasts use (at least in the US). To solve this, I scoured the internet for a solution. I summarize it here for convenience.

1. Install the QNAP FFmpeg version from QNAPClub.eu. This is the easiest way and it appears to be safe. You can also do this manually by grabbing FFmpeg on Github.
2. Backup the installed version of FFmpeg:

mv /usr/bin/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg.bak
mv /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/CodexPack/opt/cdx/bin/ffmpeg /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/CodexPack/opt/cdx/bin/ffmpeg.bak

3. Symlink to the ffmpeg you just installed:

ln -s /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/ffmpeg/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg
ln -s /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/ffmpeg/ffmpeg /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/CodexPack/opt/cdx/bin/ffmpeg

You’re done!

Some caveats:

I’m not sure if this version of ffmpeg leverages hardware transcoding support on QNAP. It takes a long time, but other transcoding took a long time for me before I did this, so I can’t tell. The forum mention I took this from said there are still issues transcoding some videos, but probably not TV recordings.

To Undo:

mv /usr/bin/ffmpeg.bak /usr/bin/ffmpeg
mv /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/CodexPack/opt/cdx/bin/ffmpeg.bak /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/CodexPack/opt/cdx/bin/ffmpeg