The future of Filebot on Linux (headless)

[nicoparker]

Hello everyone,

I've been using Filebot on a dedicated server the last years and was stuck on 4.7.9 for a while until I realized that the new versions requires a licence (or need to be bought in some store). I don't mind participating but I have a few questions :
-will the headless linux builds still be supported in the future?
-there are as far as I understood Java 8 and Java 11 versions, why so?
-some forum post mention that the deb packages include Java now?
-is it possible to use a single licence on 2 different devices (typically : headless server plus desktop or NAS) ?
-are there any plans for developing a deamon that automates things and would help justify the price (for ex : checking a folder for new shows / movies, looking for video files, renaming, sorting and downloading subtitles) ?

Thanks for the hard work and regards,
Nico

[rednoah]

1.
Yes, the filebot command-line tools are here to stay. Not just because we like using them ourselves for all kinds of things, but because they make automated testing, bug reports, etc easier, and that makes FileBot better internally which in turn benefits both CLI and GUI alike.


2.
Compatibility reasons. Why does Windows XP still exist? That's why. Same reason. FileBot prefers the latest and greatest JDK, but since there's plenty of people that are stuck with Java 8 for one reason or another (e.g. Java 11 does not support 32-bit Windows; Ubuntu 16.04 doesn't have Java 11 packages; armv5 and ppc devices not supported; etc).


3.
The Debian packages are independent of CPU architecture, and thus rely on OpenJDK packages provided by your package manager:
https://www.filebot.net/linux/apt.html


4.
Yes, you can freely use your license on different machines at the same time. A desktop plus headless server in the cloud would be a very typical setup.


5.
The command-line tools are designed for automation. Most users would use the amc script. You will find setup instructions for unattended setups there.


Conceptually, there's 3 kinds of setup:
* 3rd party tool (e.g. qBT) calls filebot on newly completed files (this is the generally recommended approach)
* A scheduler (e.g. cron) routinely calls filebot on a given input folder (less efficient, but usually easy to set up)
* A service watches for file system events, and then call filebot whenever files are added to a folder (might work for local file systems, probably won't work for remote network shares)


Depending on your platform, software configuration, your requirements, your setup, etc some of these approaches may be better than others, and more or less easy to set up:
* Watch folders with Automator on macOS: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3908
* Use inotifywait to watch folders on Linux: https://github.com/filebot/filebot-docker

[nicoparker]

Hello,
1. Good to know
2. By why, I meant : is there a technical reason or benefits of some sorts to have both? Is there no backward compatibility if you stick on Java 8? (to widen compatibility)
3. Just tried, works fine (posted a remark on the .deb package thread)
4. Cool, bought a licence
5. Lots of infos there, I will read that carefully on the weekend.

Thanks for the answers and regards

[rednoah]

2.
Java 11 supports HiDPI display modes and HTTP/2 and has better support for modern aarch64 and ppc64 platforms. If you're using a headless x86-64 Linux device, then you will not notice a difference. If you were using the GUI on a HiDPI display, you would notice a stark difference.

[nicoparker]

Thanks for the details, I should consider the Java 8 version as outdated now.
That's a good reason to migrate my server I guess!