More storage for media : organize files using ChatGPT : part 3, converting MOV to HEVC MPEG-4

Introduction

You might wish to know more about MOV, MPEG-4 and HEVC. You may prompt ChatGPT on my choice of the end format, there are pros and cons, get to know about VVC.

Setup

Given my past experience I will build ffmpeg from sources with HEVC support.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config git yasm libx264-dev libx265-dev libnuma-dev libfdk-aac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopus-dev libvpx-dev

sudo apt install nasm

git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg

cd ffmpeg

My favorite part:

./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libvpx --enable-nonfree

make

sudo make install

Checking:

ffmpeg -codecs | grep hevc

Great!

Clean up:

cd ..

rm -rf ffmpeg

convert MOV to MPEG-4 HEVC using ffmpeg

The setup is a complicated part, all the rest is trivial.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx265 -crf 23 -preset medium -c:a aac -b:a 192k output.mp4

Feel free to use the settings that reflect your need.

Bonus

This should be a good start for you:

Hi ChatGPT, I wish to compress some old videos of mine into the mp4 hevc with normal quality, possibly with some loss, and my best wish would be to reduce the file size as much as we can, however preserving the quality, could you please suggest me the resolution and the bitrate in one line, and the ffmpeg command in the second line ? Short answer, thank you !

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -preset medium -crf 28 -vf "scale=1280:720" -b:v 1500k output.mp4