Down and dirty (foss) video compression software?

Harvey

Well compressing a video in a archive like .tar, .rar, .7z etc will make no meaningful change to the file size. Re-encoding the video to something still worth watching is unlikely to get you to the size you are after which is over a 50%+ reduction.

Spanned zip / rar would work but it would require multiple emails to send the pieces and is just overly complicated for the average person to deal with.

All I can say is google drive allows you to share selected content, to anyone who has the link for it thus no inviting is required. Other than that I have no good answer for your scenario as you've ruled it all out.

brent

Harvey Harvey the quality of going from 50 to 31MB--the lowest I could muster---rendered truly horrid results so it's not even worth a 7zip and an email. The degradation was like watching sandpaper.. I thought there was some magical software animal that could do something this simple (to me, that is).

My reasoning is I've used, nemo fileroller and a common cli program to change 10MB jpegs into 2MB pngs so I could post pictures to this forum....with NO change in quality really. I thought that would exist with video/audio files as well.

@Sebastian ---thank you for that idea, too. I like it.

Sebastian

Lately, I had the same scenario. I had a mp4 video made with my phone that I needed to send per email. And it was way to big. Was searching for a quick and easy way to shrink it in size on linux. Turned out to be not that easy and I was out of patience. So I just send me the video to myself via WhatsApp. WhatsApp shrinks videos a lot by sharing them. And then I send that file per mail. That was the best I could do 🙈 Quick and dirty life hack

Sebastian

For sharing your video you could also use the wetransfer service.
That is a webpage to which you can upload the File you want to share. You have to provide your email adress and the one of the person you wanna share the file with. This person then receives an email from wetransfer containing a link to download the file.
The link expires within 7 days or so.

xjdwc

Does this option interest you?
Internxt Send

brent

xjdwc thats pretty badass but I don't need all the encryption and privacy per se, it's just only rock and roll I'm sending🙂 --I did read the Terms of Service/Privacy tab because I'm a weirdo and I read those everywhere I go. Filed for sure.

alfisya

Try this FFmpeg Commander, it creates ffmpeg command for you with your need.

brent

alfisya I will try this and check the quality/size later. I have heard ffmpeg had these capabilities, thank you

Axios

alfisya Way out site didnt know that animal existed.
Was just reading up on fffmpeg when you posted that.
Thanks

brent

alfisya it's interesting. In the output of my tries the Commander uses handbrake as an encoder. Finding the sweet spot between quality/MB right now in Commander's settings but they are all increasing the 50MB source file size...maybe the COmmander's Presets are not where I should be shrinking the m4v?
Will keep playing.

ReillyBrogan

You can share individual files in GDrive and make them completely public to anyone with the link. Then just send the link to them.

alfisya

Axios There is also GUI for FFmpeg for encoding/decoding(?) in the repo called winff. It's very old, there is a setting for blackberry device. More recent one I found is videomass available as appimage.

Axios

alfisya Ya I got winff on other machine never used it much just didnt do it for me.

Axios

alfisya I remember videomass now after I downloaded it
I could never get the appimage to work on my installs

sangheeta

Use Youtube if you have an account, excellent video converter.
Upload your video, keep it private etc, then download it from youtube studio.
I did this several time, a 720p 350Mb video can finish 30Mb still 720p on your computer in mp4 format.

murbert

"I'll be happy to put it on your thumb drive when you bring it to me"

brent

murbert "It's been a couple weeks. Do you still have my thumb drive?"

murbert

brent This is why you put it on their thumb drive

Axios

brent MP4 H.265,H.264 is prob your best bet
Lowering bitrate decreases file size but reduces quality of video.
I have a prog but its on a old computer you put some info in and it came up with the desired bitrate
But you got to think maybe there isnt much there to work with if its not raw video to start with.
Kinda like a flac audio file its raw audio and you can downgrade it to any the other formats with no problem.
If it is already mp4 or something whatever you do is going make it worse. (probably)
Follow?
Note always record audio/video in raw if you plan to edit heavy. I havent kept up with all the video advances
but thats the basics.

brent

Axios It's a 5 minute live performance that I extracted a from DVD in Handbrake, in Solus.
Handbrake saved it high quality, in an .m4v format which I never heard of but now I know it's in the family of .mp4...
5 minutes=50MB when I look at it that way. That's about right, isn't it?

I heard h264/265 was my goal. no 265 in Commander but some 264's...all increased size..

strangely when I began this fruitless journey with Handbrake and ended with it---dig this: when I just saved in the Handbrake 264/265 they shrunk a little but quality on the eyeballs was lo-res harsh.

Axios If it is already mp4 or something whatever you do is going make it worse.
Follow?

Now I do!

Axios Kinda like a flac audio file its raw audio and you can downgrade it to any the other formats with no problem.

Yes. those kind of compression changes I don't have a music pro's ear to notice. correct. but seeing a different story here w/the video.

It's funny to me in 2023 all sorts of Great Software is compressed into an email-able 7zip, Zip, Targz, etc etc that you have to extract to decompress.....but also in 2023 you can't do that with a video file... 🙁.

edit; thanks for the great reply

Axios

brent Can handbrake extract it as avi (avi=Raw)?
5min at 720 is around 55mb
5min at 480 is around 19mb
5min at 360 is around 15mb
approximates