Compressing mp4 videos files for drive space

[D.O.A.]

I have over 98,000 videos uploaded into threads/posts so I wanted to see if I can make any savings with ffmpeg, long story short, yes. I compressed 70,000 odd videos (mp4) and saved 154GB, for a 18% reduction of the total of 853GB. No loss in quality. So I'll leave it here. Probaly wouldn't hurt to chmod 600 the log file if you do it in /video.

Set your video path and run the bash script. Run it every now and then.

• will create a temp video file.
• if temp video file is smaller, replace original video.
• if bigger, delete temp video file.
• log result/check log on next run and skip processed files.

#!/bin/bash

# Set the parent directory
PARENT_DIR="/path/to/data/video"  # Change this to your actual parent directory

# Log file to track conversions
LOG_FILE="conversion.log"

# ffmpeg settings
FFMPEG_CMD="ffmpeg -i"

# Conversion options
VIDEO_CODEC="-c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 23"
AUDIO_CODEC="-c:a aac -b:a 128k"
MOV_FLAGS="-movflags +faststart"

# Check if the log file exists, if not, create it
if [[ ! -f "$LOG_FILE" ]]; then
    touch "$LOG_FILE"
fi

# Function to log conversion results
log_conversion() {
    echo "$1" >> "$LOG_FILE"
}

# Flag to track if any conversions are done
conversion_done=false

# Find all MP4 files in the parent directory and subdirectories
find "$PARENT_DIR" -type f -name "*.mp4" | while read -r input_file; do
    # Check if the file was successfully converted or failed previously
    if grep -q "^$input_file: SUCCESS" "$LOG_FILE" || grep -q "^$input_file: FAILED" "$LOG_FILE"; then
        continue
    fi

    # Create a temporary output file
    temp_file="${input_file}.temp.mp4"

    # Run the ffmpeg compression command
    $FFMPEG_CMD "$input_file" $VIDEO_CODEC $AUDIO_CODEC $MOV_FLAGS "$temp_file" < /dev/null

    # Check if ffmpeg succeeded
    if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
        # Compare the sizes of the original and the compressed file
        original_size=$(stat -c %s "$input_file")
        new_size=$(stat -c %s "$temp_file")

        # If the new file is smaller, replace the original
        if (( new_size < original_size )); then
            mv "$temp_file" "$input_file"
            log_conversion "$input_file: SUCCESS"
            conversion_done=true
        else
            # Delete the temporary file if it's not smaller
            rm "$temp_file"
            log_conversion "$input_file: FAILED (Larger or same size)"
        fi
    else
        # Log failure if ffmpeg failed
        rm -f "$temp_file"
        log_conversion "$input_file: FAILED (ffmpeg error)"
    fi
done

# If no conversions were done, print a message and exit
if [[ "$conversion_done" == false ]]; then
    echo "No files to convert. Exiting."
    exit 0
else
    echo "Conversion completed. Check the log file for details."
fi

 

[rdn]

Hi, thanks for the script.

Will it update also the XenForo data with the new file size of the video?
Thinking of running this agains't media gallery videos.

 

[D.O.A.]

Hi, thanks for the script.

Will it update also the XenForo data with the new file size of the video?
Thinking of running this agains't media gallery videos.

I never checked that so I'm not sure. Videos work fine still though.

 

[avalanch]

If you still need to compress videos, you can always run jpegmini on it for lossless compression also.