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Flo
Asked: 2019-09-11 08:10:31 +0800 CST

Batch Compress Videos with ffmpeg

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I have many videos in a folder, and I want to compress them all with one command.

To compress one video I use:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp4

But what if I have many videos I want to compress? I've tried the following:

ffmpeg -i ./videos ./compressed-videos

But then I get this error:

./videos: Is a directory
command-line video ffmpeg compression mp4

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I would use bash for loop for this purpose - let's assume you are in the parent directory, that contains the directories videos/ and compressed/:

    for f in videos/*mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "compressed/${f##*/}"; done

    Or if you want to convert any type of video file to mkv, you can use:

    for f in videos/*; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "compressed/$(basename "${f%.*}").mkv"; done

    In the above examples:

    • ${var##*/} will outputs all characters after the last slash /, so only the filename without the path will remains;
    • ${f%.*} will outputs all characters before the last dot, so the path and the filename will be kept but the file extension will be removed. Then the command substitution $(basename "/path/name") will outputs only the name without the path.

    References:

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