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Installation

The Surfmeter Media Toolkit is distributed as a self-contained archive for Linux and as a Docker image. AVEQ provides you with the download link or registry access, together with a registration key.

Requirements

  • Linux on x86_64 or arm64 with glibc 2.28 or later, for example RHEL, AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8, Debian 10, Ubuntu 20.04, or newer
  • The system libraries glibc, zlib and bzip2 (installed on practically every Linux system). All other libraries are included in the archive.

In both cases, the toolkit needs to reach the Surfmeter server over HTTPS for the registration and a license check about once a day. If the server cannot be reached, the toolkit keeps working for 7 days after the last successful check.

Hardware

The toolkit runs on any x86_64 or arm64 CPU. The installation needs less than 100 MB of disk space.

The analysis is CPU-bound and scales with the number of cores. We recommend 8 cores or more for pixel metrics and full-reference metrics on HD or UHD content. As an indication, the default pixel metrics run at about 150 frames per second for 1080p content on 8 threads, and VMAF at about 200 frames per second.

Installing the archive

The archive is named surfmeter-media-<version>-linux-<arch>.tar.gz, where <arch> is x86_64 or arm64. Unpack it anywhere and run bin/surfmeter-media:

tar -xzf surfmeter-media-0.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd surfmeter-media-0.9.2-linux-x86_64
bin/surfmeter-media --version

To install it system-wide and put it on your PATH:

sudo mv surfmeter-media-0.9.2-linux-x86_64 /opt/surfmeter-media
sudo ln -s /opt/surfmeter-media/bin/surfmeter-media /usr/local/bin/surfmeter-media

Keep the directory layout

The program finds its components relative to its own location. Only move the entire installation at once.

Updating

To update, unpack the new archive and replace the old directory. The registration is stored outside of the installation directory (see Registration), so it is kept.

tar -xzf surfmeter-media-<new-version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo rm -rf /opt/surfmeter-media
sudo mv surfmeter-media-<new-version>-linux-x86_64 /opt/surfmeter-media

Using the Docker image

The image is available for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 at:

registry.aveq.info/surfmeter/surfmeter-media:<version>

Log in with the credentials you received from AVEQ and pull the image:

docker login registry.aveq.info
docker pull registry.aveq.info/surfmeter/surfmeter-media:latest

To get your video files into the container, mount two directories:

  • /data: the working directory. Mount the directory with your video files here.
  • /config: a persistent volume that stores the registration profile (/config/media-toolkit.json).

By default, the container runs as user 1000. You can run the container as your own user with --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)". This way, the output files belong to you.

For example, to show the stream information of a file in the current directory:

docker run --rm --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -v "$PWD:/data" \
  registry.aveq.info/surfmeter/surfmeter-media:latest \
  probe input.ts

Add -it to docker run when you use the terminal view (--tui). See Registration for how to keep a registration across container runs.

Next steps

Next, register the installation.