Compress videos on server

[mavhc]

Has anyone written anything to scan folders on your file server and compress video files that are poorly compressed, from ipads, phones etc?

 

First issue I've thought of is working out which videos haven't been compressed well already.

[CyberNerd]

Has anyone written anything to scan folders on your file server and compress video files that are poorly compressed, from ipads, phones etc?

 

First issue I've thought of is working out which videos haven't been compressed well already.

 

We have a samba server. A while back we had a script that compresses on upload, but it overloaded too much if many people uploaded simultaneously.

Now I just run a one liner every now and again and insist it all gets uploaded to Google drive.

find /dir/ -iname "*.mov" -o -iname "*.mpg" -exec ffmpeg -threads 8 -i {} -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 100k -c:a libvorbis -vf "transpose=1" {}.webm

[Arthur]

First issue I've thought of is working out which videos haven't been compressed well already.

Could you get ffmpeg to write a metadata tag (e.g. -metadata author="mavhc") to the videos you encode and then check for the presence of this tag so they don't get continually re-encoded?

[mavhc]

Seems to work, although not with author for some reason, will post python code once complete

[mavhc]

https://github.com/mavhc/shrink-video-recursive-python

 

Not tested on linux, but written to be cross platform, let me know of the many bugs it no doubt has

[CyberNerd]

https://github.com/mavhc/shrink-video-recursive-python

 

Not tested on linux, but written to be cross platform, let me know of the many bugs it no doubt has

 

Well done. My improvement would be to use HEVC or VP9 as these will get a 40-50% improvement over legacy (h.264) codec.

[mavhc]

Well, that's the easy part, pick whatever you like really, I went for max compatibility. Mobile devices are terrible at real time video compression

[mavhc]

Updated it so it actually works now, was missing a function I thought I didn't need.

[Marci]

I just have Adobe Media Encoder set up with watch folders, set to compress to H264 or HAP on the fly as files come in, regardless of their prior compression state.

[DrCheese]

I just have Adobe Media Encoder set up with watch folders, set to compress to H264 or HAP on the fly as files come in, regardless of their prior compression state.

 

Do you do this across the whole drive? I'm really struggling with just how much video content people try to throw on the main drive

[mavhc]

There's a few issues to cope with:

1. Videos direct from devices can easily be halved in size with my script, etc, because they use low battery single pass compression

2. Duplicate files because people haven't been trained to handle media

3. Files no one needs any more.

 

Suggestions: 1. Run scripts to half video sizes. 2. Training and duplicate file searches. 3. Quotas to force videos to be stored centrally, folder structures pre prepared to hint to people where to put files, and then it's easy to archive old files.

[DrCheese]

Yikes, that script is awesome. I fed it a 1gb .mov file we have and it squashed it to 75mb! Side by side showed little to no quality degradation. (Of course this isn't the same results for every file, depending on the codec)

 

Yes, we've sort of had a multimedia share for a while that's separated out into school years as it's rare that video needs to be kept longer than two school years (i.e GCSE dance performances) - But as we've not had quota's/restrictions on our shared workgroups/home folders staff have been shoving them in there, which has caused issues with disk space. I'm going to change that soon as we recently had to restore most of our data server following a crash & a large amount of restore time was taken up restoring video files we didn't need.

[mavhc]

Really schools need to employ a librarian to manage information, sort it, tag it according to the needs of the users. Classification etc.