Incompatibilities with current ffmpeg versions

[peterjeschke]

Hi, thank you for the project!

I just tried a "bare-metal" deployment and noticed that the server crashes when it tries to call out to ffmpeg. After some investigation, I found out that the ffmpeg library hollo uses is deprecated: https://github.com/fluent-ffmpeg/node-fluent-ffmpeg with the notice that it doesn't support current versions of ffmpeg. Here's an overview of ffmpeg versions:

• Version 8.0 was released in August
• Version 7.1 is the one I'm using (it's the default in my package manager)
• The Docker image provided still uses version 6.1

node-fluent-ffmpeg does not provide any compat information, but I assume that Hollo only works with ffmpeg 6.

Since Hollo only uses ffmpeg in one place (for generating video thumbnails: https://github.com/fedify-dev/hollo/blob/main/src/media.ts#L74), I suggest either moving to a new library or invoking ffmpeg directly (ideally with a gracefull failure scenario instead of a server crash).

I can submit a PR if you don't have any other plans for this.

Aside: The docker image still works because it uses node:24.0-alpine as its base - the tag is no longer updated, it should be node:24-alpine instead. But luckily, the old tag still has an old version of ffmpeg, while the current tag has already updated

[dahlia]

Thanks for the detailed report and investigation!

If you're willing to submit a PR, that would be great. A couple of points to consider:

1. Please make sure to add graceful error handling—if ffmpeg fails, it shouldn't crash the server (perhaps log the error and skip thumbnail generation).

2. Don't forget to update the Dockerfile base image tag as well (to a pinned version like node:24.12-alpine instead of node:24.0-alpine).

Let me know if you have any questions about the codebase. Thanks!