Hello!
I’m looking for a solution to compress my images and videos to share with my friends online when they’re too large. This would mainly be when sharing things from my phone, and sometimes pc.
Is there any privacy friendly apps or websites that can compress my media?
You need a computer for this though. A powerful one if you want it done rather quickly.
Go to the video tab. If you know exactly how much file size you need, set it to average bitrate and choose a value that gets the video just under the limit. If you don’t, choose constant quality and raise the CRF. For H.264 or AV1 video (most likely what you’re dealing with) 35 is a good place to start.
The above two tools, and also all the sketchy websites, are GUI frontends for the FOSS beast that does the work: ffmpeg. I recommend the GUIs though, ffmpeg is very hard to use. I just think it deserves credit.
Now, for sketchy image compression, the FOSS beast in the background there is ImageMagick. ImageMagick’s command line is actually pretty simple so I recommend it if you’re at all comfortable.
ImageMagick doesn’t have any built in way to target a file size, so you’ll need to do some trial and error with the resize argument.
While we’re here, IM can do conversions too:
magick input.jpg output.png
Or whatever other file types you want.
Thanks for the suggestions!
I tried to look at HandBrake before, but the website never loaded for me until now. If I’m on my pc, that’ll be my go to, and seems simple enough.
Shutter Encoder also looks good for the pc, just a little more complicated than what I’m trying to do.
But I’m mainly on my phone and want to send videos or photos I take to friends, and these apps are for computers. Is there a good app or website for my phone to do it instead?
I’m sorry that this isn’t a great answer, but I can’t find a useful open-source app for Android. Some previous apps I found were abandoned.
Most chat app, including Signal, will automatically compress videos and images.
If you must compress manually on your phone, you can, if you’re willing to take some cumbersome steps:
This isn’t as easy as installing an app, but you can set this up with some practice if you must convert on a mobile device.