video-compression 8

There are some small pleasures in life, not worth mentioning by themselves, but sometimes they come together so well. Like: Google Pay popping up a “Disable verification for transit?” option, so I just touch my phone to the bus ticket reader even while on a call and it just works like my card. (It works even without Internet!) Finding a seat at the front of the double-decker bus on top, so I can take in the entire vista from a height for the entire one hour ride Discovering the ultra-configurable Open Camera app (thanks to Thej) and capturing at the much smaller 640x480 resolution at 10x speed Transferring it like a breeze to my laptop with LocalSend Compressing it into an ultra-small 1.4MB video thanks to the AV1 codec and FFmpeg Publishing it to Cloudflare within a second thanks to ultra-fast WiFi Watch the video Yeah… this is life!

I sometimes use Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, etc. to record workshops and talks. These record the entire session, including before and after the actual talk, and save it as large MP4 files. I use ffmpeg to trim the video to just the talk, and then compress it for sharing. I’m sharing the options that work for me, discovered by trial-and-error. To trim it, I use the following command: ffmpeg -ss 00:10:00 -to 02:10:00 \ -i "original.mp4" \ -map 0 \ -c copy \ -avoid_negative_ts make_zero \ -movflags +faststart \ new.mp4 Arguments: ...

Since WEBM compresses videos very efficiently, I’ve started using videos more often. For example, in Prototyping the prototypes and in Using game-playing agents to teach. I use a fish script to compress screencasts like this: # Increase quality with lower crf= (55 is default, 45 is better/larger) # and higher fps= (5 is default, 10 is better/larger). screencastcompress --crf 45 --fps 10 a.webm b.webm ... To record the screencasts, I prefer slightly automated approaches for ease and quality. ...

I recorded a short screen cast of a demo I built. It was ~900KB - way too large to publish as a thumbnail. So I asked ChatGPT: What’s the best equivalent of squoosh.app for WEBM compression? I’m looking for a free modern high-quality online video compressor. There are a few, and they compressed it to a third of its size, but 300KB is still too large. So I attached the original and asked: ...

Dr DivX is now open source. You may prefer it to Virtual Dub.

Capturing movies on the fly. Comments Sumit Dhar 30 Nov 2005 1:28 am: SnapZ is a Mac only application? For Windows, I use VirtualDub. Not very intuitive or easy to use, but does the job. S Anand 30 Nov 2005 11:07 am: So do I! It’s pretty effective. I do my video compression on VirtualDub as well.

DivX 5 is out. Sounds good.

Now I can watch DivX movies on my laptop.