Reducing video size with same format and reducing frame size

Solution 1:

ffmpeg provides this functionality. All you need to do is run someting like

ffmpeg -i <inputfilename> -s 640x480 -b 512k -vcodec mpeg1video -acodec copy <outputfilename>

For newer versions of ffmpeg you need to change -b to -b:v:

ffmpeg -i <inputfilename> -s 640x480 -b:v 512k -vcodec mpeg1video -acodec copy <outputfilename>

to convert the input video file to a video with a size of 640 x 480 and a bitrate of 512 kilobits/sec using the MPEG 1 video codec and just copying the original audio stream. Of course, you can plug in any values you need and play around with the size and bitrate to achieve the quality/size tradeoff you are looking for. There are also a ton of other options described in the documentation

Run ffmpeg -formats or ffmpeg -codecs for a list of all of the available formats and codecs. If you don't have to target a specific codec for the final output, you can achieve better compression ratios with minimal quality loss using a state of the art codec like H.264.

Solution 2:

If you want to keep same screen size, you can consider using crf factor: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

Here is the command which works for me: (on mac you need to add -strict -2 to be able to use aac audio codec.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 24 -b:v 1M -c:a aac output.mp4

Solution 3:

Instead of chosing fixed bit rates, with the H.264 codec, you can also chose a different preset as described at https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/x264EncodingGuide. I also found Video encoder comparison at KeyJ's blog (archived version) an interesting read, it compares H.264 against Theora and others.

Following is a comparison of various options I tried. The recorded video was originally 673M in size, taken on an iPad using RecordMyScreen. It has a duration of about 20 minutes with a resolution of 1024x768 (with half of the video being blank, so I cropped it to 768x768). In order to reduce size, I lowered the resolution to 480x480. There is no audio.

The results, taking the same 1024x768 as base (and applying cropping, scaling and a filter):

• With no special options: 95M (encoding time: 1m19s).
• With only -b 512k added, the size dropped to 77M (encoding time: 1m17s).
• With only -preset veryslow (and no -b), it became 70M (encoding time: 6m14s)
• With both -b 512k and -preset veryslow, the size becomes 77M (100K smaller than just -b 512k).
• With -preset veryslow -crf 28, I get a file of 39M which took 5m47s (with no visual quality difference to me).

N=1, so take the results with a grain of salt and perform your own tests.

Solution 4:

There is an application for both Mac & Windows call Handbrake, i know this isn't command line stuff but for a quick open file - select output file format & rough output size whilst keeping most of the good stuff about the video then this is good, it's a just a graphical view of ffmpeg at its best ... It does support command line input for those die hard texters.. https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php