avconv/ffmpeg temp files?

[mahjohn]

Ubuntu 14.04

I'm in the process of converting movies from .MKV to .MP4. I convert some, then once completed, remove the .mkv file, leaving the .mp4. As the .mp4 file is slightly smaller than the .MKV, my free space should be the same, or slightly more, however, I'm losing space i this process. for every 10GB's of files I convert, I lose 10GB's of space. So my question is....does avconv/ffmeg create temp files while processing movies, and if so, how can I find these to clean them up and reclaim my disk space?

thanks

[poisondeathray]

exactly how did you "remove the .mkv file" ? Those numbers are suspicious for you forgetting to empty the trash folder (permanently deleting the mkv)

[mahjohn]

I would agree, and hope that's the case...as Linux is not my forte. However, I've looked for /home/your_username/.local/share/Trash and it is not there. The part of the path shown that i can get to is /home. Looking around, people have said that the Trash folder may not exist until you delete something, but as I have, shouldn't it be created?

I'm using "rm" to delete the mkv's

thanks

[racer-x]

Try creating a new directory, set the batch file to save the outputs to the new directory, then manually delete the old directory when finished.

[ackboo]

The first place to look for temp files is /tmp, you can try
list files including hidden ones

ls -lah /tmp

get the total size of /tmp or any directory

du -sh /tmp

To check your free space

df -h

To check for files above 500 MB that are not mp4 or mkv, iname means case insensitive so mkv and MKV will be excluded. Tweak to your liking.

find /your/path/ -type f -size +500M  ! -iname "*.mp4" ! -iname "*.mkv"

[mahjohn]

Created a folder: /user/home/test cp a file movie*.mp4, rm to delete the movie and checked for "Trash" folder...still not there.

ls -lah /tmp

total 16K

du -sh /tmp

20K /tmp

df -h

/dev/sda1 2.0T 1.5T 463G 77% /
*...this was 497GB I converted 30GB of movies from MKV to MP4 and was at ~437GB, delete3d the .MKV's and shortly after returned to 463GB.

find /your/path/ -type f -size +500M  ! -iname "*.mp4" ! -iname "*.mkv"

This showed a few files that are still avi, and one that is named ".mkv.IF6Jkf", so not sure if this is a remnant of an interrupted process and is the temp fiel that avconv/ffmpeg creates and if so, where would the other ones be (just a guess)

thanks,

[ackboo]

rm to delete the movie and checked for "Trash" folder...still not there.

rm deletes files, period, it doesn't put files in the trash. Try to reboot the machine and do a df -h afterwards.

[ackboo]

This showed a few files that are still avi, and one that is named ".mkv.IF6Jkf",

Assuming this is a remnant and that the naming is consistent try

find /your/path/ -type f -name "*.mkv.??????"

If nothing is returned try running this on the root directory, this will require the use of sudo so be very careful.

find / -type f -name "*.mkv.??????"

[mahjohn]

Well, now it's a complete mystery to me.

I used

find -type f -iname ".*" -ls

followed by this

find -type d -iname ".*" -ls

Neither one showed me anything I hadn't seen before. I install "tree"

tree -h -A /videos > /videos/ouput.txt

I brought the list back over to my desktop, imported into Excel, filtered and started scanning...I noticed there were multiple instances of the .mkv and the .mp4 for the same file. Went back to the terminal to see how hard it would be to locate them, and now they are showing in the directory. I then ran

df -h

and I'm back up to 493G free.

So as I said in the first line...a complete mystery to me. I had avconv running yesterday for 5 hrs straight till I killed it. Has it taken this long for Ubuntu file system to catch up?...

[ackboo]

I guess it has to do with this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/332629/rm-not-freeing-diskspace
Maybe plex was still trying to read the files and delayed the free space recovery.

Another possibility is that your hdd or filesystem is dying.

[mahjohn]

Thanks for the help everyone, greatly appreciated!