[sudo-discuss] how to speed up a video file and reduce its size?

[Sean Greenslade]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 01:11:12PM -0700, Jake wrote:
> OMG thank you so much, this is great help everyone!!!
> 
> some operations take a long time and some are quicker, i'm trying to hone in on
> the ones that are quick and dirty, rather than re-encoding everything.  It's so
> hard to understand the documentation!!!

Yeah, FFMPEG can be pretty intimidating. Unfortunately, in the case of
doing time lapses, you almost certainly need to re-encode the video. The
one exception would be if your desired speedup exactly matches the rate of
i-frames in the source video. Then you could make a custom script that
just dropped all the p-frames. I have some code that could probably be
adapted for that if you're interested.

> I'll try these commands and take notes on what works and what doesn't.  Feel
> free to let me know if you're interested in the results!

Yeah, show us!
 
> one thing i've been working with is that i'm doing concatenation at the same
> time... so much obscure arcane procedure that you just find on the web and try
> until it works.

Concatenation can be tricky. Make absolutely sure all the source videos
have the same format / resolution.
 
> And i was having troubles until i realized that the hard drives in the server I
> was accessing were slowly dying off from overheating...

Lol, yup, hard drives can get pretty toasty when they're being
stressed. Make sure your servers have fans pointed at the drives.

--Sean