FAQ

Why are ffmpeg or other tools not bundled?

One of the common questions is why rust-srec does not come bundled with ffmpeg, streamlink, yt-dlp, or other similar tools. There are several reasons for this:

1. Licensing and Legal Compliance

ffmpeg and many other multimedia tools are often licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). Bundling these binaries directly within our distribution could impose certain licensing obligations on rust-srec itself or complicate the legal aspects of redistribution. By requiring users to provide their own binaries, we avoid these complexities and respect the licensing of these external projects.

2. Binary Size

Tools like ffmpeg and yt-dlp are quite large. Bundling them would increase the download size of rust-srec by tens or even hundreds of megabytes. We prefer to keep our application lightweight and let you manage your own installations of these tools.

3. Update Frequency and Independence

External tools, especially yt-dlp and streamlink, receive frequent updates to maintain compatibility with various streaming platforms. If we bundled them, you would have to wait for a new release of rust-srec just to get the latest fixes for your favorite platform. Keeping them separate allows you to update them independently as soon as new versions are available.

4. Platform-Specific Customization

Different platforms and hardware configurations may benefit from different builds of ffmpeg. For example, some users might need specific hardware acceleration support (like NVENC, QSV, or VAAPI). By having you install your own ffmpeg, you can choose the build that best fits your specific needs and environment.

5. Separation of Concerns

rust-srec is designed to be an orchestrator and manager for stream recording. We focus on providing a robust scheduling and pipeline system, while leveraging well-established, specialized tools for the actual media handling when the built-in Rust engine is not used.

How do I install these tools?

Please refer to our Installation Guide for instructions on how to install the necessary dependencies for your platform.

I ran out of disk space. I cleared files, but recordings don't resume. What do I do?

Check the /health endpoint or the system health page in the UI. Look at the output-root component:

• Status Degraded, error_kind: not_found — you most likely cleared files via a host-side operation (BaoTa file manager, mv on the mount source directory, etc.) that broke the Docker bind mount. The container is holding an orphaned inode and needs to be restarted. See the Docker troubleshooting guide for safe cleanup paths.
• Status Degraded, error_kind: storage_full — the disk is genuinely full but the filesystem mount is healthy. Free space via any of the safe cleanup paths in the Docker guide (rust-srec UI, docker exec, volume expansion). No restart needed. The gate auto-recovers within ~30 seconds of the next attempted download, and every affected streamer cascades out of backoff on the same monitor tick.
• Status Degraded, error_kind: permission_denied — check ownership and mode of the target directory inside the container.
• Status Degraded, error_kind: read_only — the filesystem was remounted read-only. You'll need to remount it read-write.
• Status Degraded, error_kind: timed_out — the filesystem is hung (stale NFS handle, broken bind mount, dead block device). Investigate the underlying storage.
• Status Healthy but recordings still don't resume — the filesystem is fine from the app's perspective. Check the individual streamer's state in the UI; they may be in backoff from an unrelated error (CDN issues, rate limits). See the logs for the specific last_error.

One critical output_path_inaccessible notification is also emitted when the gate transitions to Degraded, and it contains the same error_kind plus a localized recovery hint. See the notifications doc.