ffmpeg won't execute properly in google app engine standard nodejs - google-app-engine

Question

I have tried for three full days to get GAE (standard - nodejs) to run a simple video transcoder from MOV to MP4 using ffmpeg. I have tried using ffluent-ffmpeg, kicking off a child process (e.g. spawn), and nothing works. As soon as it hits the call to the executable it always errors. I have confirmed ffmpeg is installed and even tried using ffmpeg-static. Moreover, I have it working on my local machine with no problems (using all of the aforementioned ways).
I have also tried logging the errors and nothing is really all that helpful. I can see its working through any installed package including ffmpeg (system package).
Below is the pseudo code...step three is where the problem occurs.
Send file name to GAE endpoint
Download the file from google cloud storage to a temp file
Transcode using ffmpeg
Upload temp file to google cloud storage
Remove old google cloud storage file
Remove temp file
The file I am using to test is 6MB...a 5 second video I took on my iPhone. Thank you in advance.
UPDATE: I successfully deployed the exact same code to Node Flex environment and everything works great. I wasn't able to get any errors in the standard environment that directed me where to look but my guess is it has something to do with how it stores the file I pipe into FFMPEG on GAE Node Standard. The docs say its a virtual file system that uses RAM. I'd love to hear if anybody managed to get it working in the standard environment.

Answer 1

After a long battle, I finally figured out what was going on. I did not have enough compute resources. If anyone out there is going to build a transcoding service for images and videos, be sure you up your cores to at least 4 out of the gate. My jobs were randomly failing (but not repeatable for processing the same files), web sockets were disconnecting and reconnecting, etc.
To the person who downgraded my question because I did not post an error (which I stated I did not really have)...well, there isn't going to necessarily be an error in the logs when your CPU starts dropping jobs because it can't keep up with the load. Like I mentioned in my question, I would get errors but nothing meaningful.

Answer 2

You're right, ffmpeg is listed in the pre-installed packages for the Node.js Runtime.
However they don't mention which ffmpeg version is installed.
I looked into the fluent-ffmeg prerequisites and it requires ffmpeg >= 0.9 to work.
Try to update your ffmpeg version running the command:
apt-get update ffmpeg
in your instance's console. Tell us how it goes.

Answer 3

const outFile = bucket.file(`${storagePath}`)
//create a referance to your storage bucket path
const outStream = outFile.createWriteStream()
You can always put a on 'stderr' listener to your ffmpeg command.
I had similar problems transcoding on google app engine so fluent ffmpeg stderr listener helped me a lot debugging it.
ffmpeg.addInput(`tmp/${app_engine_filepath})
.format('mp3')
.on('stderr', function(stderrLine) {
console.log('Stderr output: ' + stderrLine);
})
.on('error, (error) => {
console.log(error)
})
.pipe(outStream)
.on('end', () => {
fs.remove(`tmp/${app_engine_filepath}`)
})
You might also want to check your ffmpeg version on standart environment. (that should also be viewable through stderrlogs)