Hoping for advice on compression of an unusually large mp4 file

[The DJ]

The file consists of an old classic movie over three hours long and the file size turns out to be 8.16GB. I am familiar with video file compression sites but cannot find one to handle a file bigger than 2GB. Can anyone help please?

 

[nlogax]

Have you considered downloading something like Handbrake and compressing your files locally?

 

[jfollows]

I use ffmpeg, which has the advantage of being extremely flexible and powerful, with the disadvantage that it's got many many options and you need to read the documentation and experiment.
But to compress a mp4 file I use something like

ffmpeg -i $INPUT -max_muxing_queue_size 99999 -c:v libx264 -crf 28 -q:a 100 -tune film $OUTPUT

noting that the compression is driven here by the "crf" parameter (increase the value to increase the compression).

The level of compression that results from this command can be seen below, for example.

-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 1.1G Apr 27 20:03 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_01._Going_with_the_Flow_m00080yb_technical.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 1.1G Apr 27 21:03 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_02._At_the_Double_m00086zf_original.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 235M Apr 28 13:09 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_01._Going_with_the_Flow_m00080yb_technical.compressed.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 245M Apr 28 13:22 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_02._At_the_Double_m00086zf_original.compressed.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 1.1G Apr 28 21:03 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_03._The_Initial_Idea_m0008dpr_original.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 247M Apr 29 09:10 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_03._The_Initial_Idea_m0008dpr_original.compressed.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 1.1G Apr 29 21:03 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_04._What_Goes_Around_m0008ls4_technical.mp4
-rw-r--r-- 1 jonathan jonathan 253M Apr 30 11:10 The_Channel_Tunnel_-_Life_on_the_Inside_Series_1_-_04._What_Goes_Around_m0008ls4_technical.compressed.mp4
drwxr-xr-x 35 jonathan jonathan 12K Apr 30 11:15 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 jonathan jonathan 4.0K Apr 30 11:15 .

Whether the resulting file is acceptable in quality or not is something you will have to experiment with.

 

[Westcountryman]

An alternative is to cut the file into portions using a video editor. I suppose it depends on what you then intend to do with it.

 

[pdq]

Could you upload it to your own YouTube channel then download it back again? If you set it as private I don't think there are copyright issues. Or use a video editing program like Movavi, and change the export settings.
8gb for 3hrs doesn't seem extreme though.

 

[stuartmoss]

You could try uploading it to YouTube and then downloading the uploaded file.

 

[Westcountryman]

I took some video on a bus running day. 36 minutes of video, 16gb. Took an eternity to load to Youtube.