Command Reference

Synopsis

direct_play_nice [OPTIONS] [INPUT_FILE] [OUTPUT_FILE]

Positional arguments

• [INPUT_FILE] video file to convert (required unless probing)
• [OUTPUT_FILE] output media file (required unless probing)

Device and quality options

• -d, --device <DEVICE> target family/model or all
• --video-quality <video_quality> quality preset
• --video-codec <video_codec> auto|h264|hevc
• --audio-quality <audio_quality> quality preset
• --max-video-bitrate <max_video_bitrate> explicit video cap
• --max-audio-bitrate <max_audio_bitrate> explicit audio cap

Stream and compatibility controls

• --unsupported-video-policy <unsupported_video_policy> convert|ignore|fail
• --primary-video-stream-index <primary_video_stream_index>
• --primary-video-criteria <primary_video_criteria> resolution|bitrate|fps
• --skip-codec-check
• --validate-output reopen the completed output and fail if expected A/V codecs or stream hygiene checks do not pass

Hardware controls

• --hw-accel <hw_accel> auto|none|nvenc|vaapi|qsv|videotoolbox|amf

Probe modes

• --probe-streams
• --probe-hw
• --probe-codecs
• --probe-ocr-fixtures <PATH> evaluate OCR accuracy against fixture PNG+JSON pairs
• --only-video
• --only-hw
• --probe-json
• --output <OUTPUT> text|json
• --streams-filter <STREAMS_FILTER> all|video|audio|subtitle

Sonarr/Radarr options

• --servarr-output-extension <EXTENSION> (match-input supported)
• --servarr-output-suffix <servarr_output_suffix>
• --delete-source [<BOOL>]

Subtitle OCR options

• --sub-mode <sub_mode> auto|force|skip
• --subtitle-failure-policy <subtitle_failure_policy> skip-stream|fail
• --ocr-default-language <ocr_default_language>
• --ocr-engine <ocr_engine> auto|tesseract|pp-ocr-v3|pp-ocr-v4|external
• --ocr-format <ocr_format> srt|ass
• --ocr-write-srt-sidecar

Failure policy

• Extra video streams follow --unsupported-video-policy: ignore drops them, fail aborts, and convert attempts to include them when the output container supports it.
• Attachments, data streams, and attached pictures are treated as metadata and skipped for direct-play outputs.
• Bitmap subtitles are handled by the OCR side pass unless --sub-mode=skip; text subtitles are converted to MP4-compatible timed text when included.
• Subtitle decode/encode timestamp failures follow --subtitle-failure-policy: skip-stream warns and disables only that subtitle stream, while fail aborts conversion.
• Audio conversion setup is fail-fast: if FFmpeg cannot initialize the required resampler, conversion aborts rather than writing suspect audio.
• Hardware encoder/profile failures may retry with a safer software encoder path; decoder bitstream failures remain hard failures.

Plex options

• --plex-refresh
• --plex-url <PLEX_URL>
• --plex-token <PLEX_TOKEN>

Full generated help

For the exact, version-specific clap output:

direct_play_nice --help