Transom Video Scribe
Transcodes video in the editor’s browser; variants land as normal Craft Assets, with no server-side ffmpeg or queue.
How it works
The editor drops a video file into a Video Scribe field. The browser encodes it with ffmpeg.wasm — no server-side ffmpeg, no queue. Each configured preset (e.g. VP9 720p, H.264 1080p) uploads to Craft as a normal Asset, with a JPEG poster captured from the first frame.
By the time the editor hits Save, all variants are already in Craft.
Why browser encoding
Server-side transcoding sounds simple until you try to run it reliably: you need ffmpeg installed, a queue worker that stays up, and enough CPU headroom for jobs that can take 10–30 minutes. On a shared host, it barely works at all.
Modern laptops encode video faster than most web servers. Moving the work to the browser eliminates the infrastructure and gives editors a real-time progress bar instead of a queue they can’t see.
Requirements
- Craft CMS 5.0+
- PHP 8.3+
- A browser with WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer support (all modern browsers)