Since some films use DTS audio, others AC3, some use avi, mp4, mkv as the file format, some use x264, x265, etc. as the video codec. Not all end devices can handle these many formats and also due to the available bandwidth between the media server and the device, the media servers transcode the video formats on the fly. However, this costs a lot of computing capacity. Otherwise, I would like to run the media server on a small VM or a Raspberry. But even if I rent a very expensive server, like the one I currently have, it often reaches its load limit (even if two people are streaming).
For example, a 1080p film in Google Drive has 10.2 GB - as a streaming format in 1080p it only has 3.1 GB. That's brilliant: Google Drive has taken over the transcoding work. It converts any video, including 4k films, into streaming versions that use mp4 x264 as the video codec and mp4a aac as the audio codec - codecs that almost every device supports. Transcoding by the server would be unnecessary.
I didn't start by claiming that most people would use encryption anyway. I was just questioning this claim. Encrypting video files (I was explicitly talking about films and series, but not any private files) doesn't seem to make much sense. Apart from that, I am not convinced by the argument that a feature should not come because most (and therefore not: all, but it is left open whether a large proportion of rclone users might not use encryption after all) wouldn't need the feature at all. rclone has countless features that most people don't need. Nevertheless, rclone has them because some people need them.
For example, I only know or read about people who use rclone as a mount for their Plex or Emby library and primarily store films and series. But I don't often spend time in the rclone forum or Reddit, but rather on various scene sites. An encryption? People who simply want to run a functional private media library have not ventured into such subject areas. It's also not about a function like yt-dlp. First of all, yt-dlp does not support interception of streaming formats from G Drive, secondly it uses ffmpeg, which would not be necessary for the feature I want rclone to have. The files do not have to be transcoded. Like any other file, they should be output by rclone as normal. This means: if you retrieve a file "video.mp4" on Google Drive and have previously said "preferred-1080" in your rclone command, then rclone does not intercept the original file from the Drive API, but the MP4 that is on the Google servers and which can be received via HTTP request instead.
This is followed by the codecs of the stream and, above all, the quality information. In my case: codecs="avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2"&quality=medium,itag=22 - medium means 360p. This is followed by the URL to 720p and then the one to 1080p. If you enter one of these URLs in the browser, the stream starts - as long as you are in the same session. An authorization error occurs in a different network or just in a different application (e.g. VLC).
I'm using rclone to manage my footage archive (I'm a video shooter and for example some interviews when shooting with the latest 4K/6K cameras can generate single video files in excess of 100GB each), also a ProRes444 video master of a feature documentary film is approx 1TB (again SINGLE FILE).
8d45195817