An easy .mov converter for nextcloud

An automatic script to convert .mov files to .mp4 (or anything ffmpeg supports, e.g. .mkv), re-index the Nextcloud database and clean up afterwards

Installation

1. Download mov-2-mp4.sh and place it somewhere on your nextcloud server
2. Make it executable: chmod +x mov-2-mp4.sh
3. Chown it so your web server can use it: chown www-data:www-data mov-2-mp4.sh
4. Edit www-data's crontab (so the script always runs in the background): sudo crontab -u www-data -e
5. Add the following to the crontab: * * * * * /path/to/script/mov-to-mp4.sh (this runs every minute: to run once a day at midnight, use 0 0 * * * instead at the start)
6. (If you don't have it) download ffmpeg, e.g. sudo apt install ffmpeg (Ubuntu)

Customising for your environment

Super simple - just change these variables in the script:

Variable	Default	Comment
root_folder	/mnt/nextcloud	Place where nextcloud keeps your stuff
installation_path	/var/www/nextcloud/public_html	Place where the web server keeps nextcloud source files, leave off last slash
old_extension	.mov	The old extension to convert from
new_extension	.mp4	The new extension to convert to
safe_mode	true	Renames .mov files as .mov-old, so you can recover (setting to false deletes .mov files permanently after conversion is done!)
ignoregrep	(not set)	Files to ignore for error messages - use if you have files that find would say "Permission denied" if it tried to scan - e.g. hidden folders that www-data is not permissioned for

Optional stuff

• If you have postfix installed, you can add [email protected] at the top of the crontab file to get notifications when this script processes something (it only sends mail when it finds something, so running it each minute with crontab * * * * * won't mail you each minute!)