Would it be harmful to install and enable the Epel and RPM Forge repos on my Rocky 9 with NS8 VM? I am building a Wordpress website that I want to be able to upload and play videos on, and I’m finding it would be convenient to install ffmpeg for automatically generating thumbnails of uploaded videos when adding them to a video gallery. If there are any of you that would know the NS8 FFMPEG path to configure it in Wordpress, that’d be an additional blessing? Thanks!
There’s no harm in installing or enabling either of those repos, but I don’t think it will give you the result you’re looking for. NS8 apps (like Wordpress) run inside containers, so whatever software you’d want to install (like ffmpeg) would need to be installed inside the container–assuming it isn’t already. Perhaps @stephdl can chime in?
Yes, Dan is right. You can enable EPEL — for example, htop comes from that repository. However, a PHP directive must be installed inside the container, not at the operating-system level outside of it.
assuming you are using ns8-wordpress ?
Yes I am. Any suggested procedure(s) to accomplish installing FFMPEG from within my NS8 container, maybe using runagent at shell? I suppose I would also need to know what the directory path would be to point the video plugin to the rightpath for FFMPEG. Thanks.
the container must be build for that scenario against your package
On ffmpeg inside the module image: I looked at the cost and I will probably not go that way. Its dependency chain adds 250 to 350 MB to the image, downloaded by every ns8-wordpress install, and libavcodec / libavformat are among the heaviest CVE producers in the distribution. Bad trade for a feature very few installs need.
You most likely do not need it anyway. Uploading and playing videos already works: WordPress stores the file, the browser plays it with HTML5 <video>. The only thing ffmpeg adds is picking a frame automatically for the poster image.
Which plugin are you using for the gallery? Some only want a poster image, others also re-encode the file, and re-encoding inside the web container is something I would advise against.
If it is only the poster, two options with no system dependency:
- Set it manually. The WordPress video block accepts a poster image, so you upload a JPG next to the video.
- Use a plugin that grabs the frame in the browser at upload time. Same result, no load on the server.
One thing that will hit you harder than the thumbnails: serving video straight from the container means a single quality for everyone and every playback eating your server bandwidth. If the gallery is public, hosting the files on a video service and embedding them is usually the better call, and those services give you the thumbnail for free.
Thank you, sir. I’ll consider all that.