Compressing Videos for Video Preview

mattrixk

I have a bunch of videos that I've scraped from screenscraper.fr using the Universal XML Scraper, and I plan on getting a lot more.

These files look great, but they are all 640x480, and anywhere from 3MB to 15MB. This is too big to be useful on a normal setup, and I'm not sure how the RPi would handle that much.

Does anyone know of a reliable way to compress these videos so the file size is much lower, while still maintaining a watchable appearance?

I've had a crack at Handbrake, but I don't really know what I'm doing. On my first try, most of the videos ended up larger than they were before. Next they were a little smaller, but one of them broke. My last try they were quite a bit smaller, but most were so poor quality I could barely tell what was going on, and the rest wouldn't open at all.

Any help is appreciated.

Zigurana

I think handbrake is definitely the way to go, as it's open source and multi-platform.
Another nice thing is that when we arrive at some acceptable trade-off between filesize and quality, we can simply share the preset/profile.

I have no experience with using it for the Rpi specifically, but the program is really well documented, see here.

Maybe you could inform at their forums for suggestions on a starting preset for this particular use-case of many small videos at reduced resolutions?

mattrixk

Thanks @Zigurana, that's something I'll have to have a look at. A guy at work said to use Adobe Media Encoder, but he's the designer so he has the whole creative suite, where-as I just have photoshop so I don't really have access to it.

screech

Do you try this : http://www.audane.com/Batch-Video-Resizer.htm

It's seems to be easier to use than Handbrake

mattrixk

@screech I downloaded and installed it, but the first thing to pop up when I opened it said "this software is a trial. Outputted video will have a watermark. Give us money to remove the watermark". Uninstalled.

hiulit

@mattrixk Handbrake is the way to go, IMHO

mattrixk

Thanks @hiulit. I'll keep trying it. I'll look through the docs and maybe post to the forum as Zigurana suggested.

FixLucy

@zigurana Excuse me sir, but it seems that you know a lot about video file compression. I have a question and I want to ask would you mind. Recently I purchased this DVD compressing software link text to compress my DVD video into MP4. The whole conversion process was fine but the output MP4 video contained no sound output but only video . I changed my DVD disc and tried again and again, still no sound. I wondered whether that was caused by the 10x acceleration which led to a content loss? Do you ever meet such a problem?

Zigurana

@fixlucy I suggest that you ask the people you bought the SW from for support, I've never worked with it.

Darksavior

SSelph's scraper for windows can auto resize videos if you run -convert_videos true with handbrakecli.exe in the same folder as the scraper.