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 MAILTO=mail@example.com 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!)