MeshBay — read-only public mirror https://git.meshbay.org/meshbay.git/atom?h=main 2026-09-05T06:43:11Z 2026-09-05T06:43:11Z Christophe Besson cbesson@gmail.com 2026-09-05T06:43:11Z urn:sha1:301c8998bfdcac80ad3302e2d2ebe853e2ea6de1 winget install ffmpeg was considered and rejected as the mechanism: it needs network access and winget/App Installer present at the exact moment setup runs, and its failure mode is silent -- video just does not stream, with nothing pointing back at ffmpeg. Not viable for a non-technical install. MeshBay transcodes browser-incompatible video to H.264 (-c:v libx264, webrtc_server.py) -- a real encode, not remux -- so this needs a genuine GPL ffmpeg build; no LGPL-only build includes an H.264 encoder, since libx264 itself is GPL. packaging/win/fetch-ffmpeg.ps1 (new) Downloads, checksum-verifies and stages ffmpeg for the build. Source: BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds' Windows x86_64 gpl-shared preset -- shared DLLs rather than two independent static binaries, which is what nearly tripled this: the "full" static build many devs already have via winget is ~220 MB *per executable*. Pinned to one dated release tag (immutable once published) and its own sha256, not the "latest" alias BtbN repoints on every auto-build -- verified by hand first (downloaded, hash matched, ran a real encode+probe with libx264) before pinning. ffplay.exe (an SDL2 player, ~17 MB) is dropped; MeshBay never invokes it. Cached after the first build. Runs its own smoke test (encode + probe a real clip) so a broken fetch fails at build time, not for the first user who tries to watch something. packaging/win/LICENSE-ffmpeg.txt (new) GPLv3 notice + where the corresponding source is, required because this redistributes a GPL binary even though it is unmodified and only ever invoked as a subprocess. Ships alongside ffmpeg.exe in the installer. build-node-runtime.ps1 / build-win.ps1 Bundling is now the DEFAULT, replacing the old opt-in -FfmpegDir (which copied from a local directory and left most builds without ffmpeg at all). -SkipFfmpeg opts out for a smaller, streaming-less local-iteration build. Also fixes a real bug the ffmpeg change exposed rather than caused: the final `--help` smoke test did `$help -notmatch "meshbay-node"` against $help captured as a PowerShell ARRAY (one element per line) -- -notmatch on a collection is a FILTER, not a boolean test, and returns the non-matching elements; any non-empty array is truthy in if() regardless of content. Once --help wrapped past one line (it now does, with autostart/service in the verb list) this threw unconditionally. Fixed by joining to one string before matching, and pinned by a new test so a future edit cannot silently reintroduce the collection-vs-scalar trap. Verified: downloaded and hashed the pinned release by hand (matches), ran a real libx264 encode + ffprobe against the extracted build, fetch-ffmpeg.ps1 end to end (161 MB staged), a full build-node-runtime.ps1 run (308 MB node-runtime/) and a full installer build (MeshBay-Setup- 1.0.0.exe, 210.8 MB with ffmpeg bundled). Node suite 850 pass / 25 skip. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>