A ffmpeg wrapper to drive it for video conversion, without dealing with the complicated command line interface.
This is a tool for Unix-like systems, for which a port of ffmpeg and python interpreter are available.
Particularity of this wrapper is that it is independent on any external library; you only need "out of the box" python stuff.
It is a wrapper around the ffmpeg tool that rescale and change bitrate of a video file mapping a clean and easy command line interface to the ffmpeg's complex one.
The current capabilities of the tool at the moment are limited to rescale and change bitrate of a video, and remove audio track.
Ensure you have python and git installed on your system, then
git clone https://github.com/alvise72/videoconvert.git
cp videconvert/video-convert /usr/local/bin
$ video-convert -h
Usage: video-convert [OPTIONS] <filename> [OPTIONS]
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-b BITRATE, --bitrate=BITRATE
Set the new bitrate (can be an pure number or a number
followed by 'k', 'K', 'm', 'M') or a percentage
-s SCALE, --scale=SCALE
Specifies the scale ratio for the resolution; can be a
floating number greater than 0 and less or equal to 1,
or an integer between 1 and 100 followed by '%'
-a, --remove-audio Remove autio track
-v, --verbose Prints out useful debug information
-i, --info Prints out size and bitrate of the video
-O, --overwrite Overwrite output file if already exists
-P FFMPEG, --ffmpeg-path=FFMPEG
Alternative path of ffmpeg binary
-p FFPROBE, --ffprobe-path=FFPROBE
Alternative path of ffprobe binary
-o OUTFILE, --output-file=OUTFILE
Alternative path for output file
-T, --T2 Use Apple's T2 encoder chip instead of software h264
$ video-convert -i ~/Video/video.mp4
Height: 720, Width: 1280, bitrate: 11621115
$ video-convert --scale 50% ~/Desktop/video.mp4 --output-file ~/Desktop/video-rescaled.mp4
Finished conversion. Output file is /Users/dorigo_a/Desktop/video-rescaled.mp4
Conversion time millis: 149419, 4472293.00 bytes/s
This conversion reduced height and width by 50%, which means that the total resolution (total number of pixels) has been reduced to 1/4. Bitrate is automatically reduced by ffmpeg:
$ video-convert -i ~/Desktop/video-rescaled.mp4
Height: 360, Width: 640, bitrate: 2091966
As can be seen, also bitrate has been reduced to 1/5 automatically by ffmpeg.
$ video-convert -b 256k ~/Desktop/video.mp4 -o ~/Desktop/video-resampled.mp4
Finished conversion. Output file is /Users/dorigo_a/Desktop/video-resampled.mp4
Conversion time millis: 212526, 3144300.00 bytes/s
Alvises-MBP:videoconvert dorigo_a$ video-convert -i ~/Desktop/video-resampled.mp4
Height: 720, Width: 1280, bitrate: 257388
In this example bitrate is reduced from 11621115 bytes/s (11.08 MBytes/s) to 257388 bytes/s (~256 kBytes/s).
Bitrate cannot be increased above the original value (that one printed using --info option).
Of course in this case quality reduction without a rescaling leads to a more grany movie with a lot of compression artifacts.