Surprisingly good video compression in FFmpeg
Published on 01 May 2017
by Alexander Garber
I spent many hours over the years feeding my videos through FFmpeg, with sometimes disappointing results when it came to video compression.
However, the video I recorded on my old Canon Legria FS200 was 20 minutes long and 1.4GB bit.
A simple command reduced it to 97MB: ffmpeg -i morning_squat.MOD morning_squat.mp4
I tried specifying a lower bitrate (original about 8548kbps) but that ruined the video, so I just left it out.
However, the video I recorded on my old Canon Legria FS200 was 20 minutes long and 1.4GB bit.
A simple command reduced it to 97MB: ffmpeg -i morning_squat.MOD morning_squat.mp4
I tried specifying a lower bitrate (original about 8548kbps) but that ruined the video, so I just left it out.