Staying in a media house, we often deal with a lot of videos. It wants to upload content for Instagram, YouTube, and even the site. Trading with different Cameras, Software, File Types, and also aspect ratios, everyone has a Video Compressor in their stable. Since I went to Ubuntu from Windows 10, I was in dire need of a suitable Video Compressor. If you can always zip video footages using the tar command or the latest quick lz4 compression, it requires decompression at the user end, which doubles up the method.
[lwptoc]
7 Best Video Compressor for Linux Online and Offline
Then while I am out on the look for excellent video compression, here is the best Video Compressor for Linux.
Avidemux
Avidemux is not your common video convertor but rather a video editing cum media compressor. Rather than using different software to edit and compress videos, I instead favor using Avidemux, which does both. You can do primary editing like trim, change audio, apply filters, etc. While it comes to compressing, it supports libx264 & libx265 codecs. Besides these, you also get to create a user-defined preset with frame rate, custom RC control, etc.
What Is Good?
- Editing apps to trim, color-correct videos on a smaller level
- Compression tools that support newest video codecs, custom RC control, etc
- Separate audio & video controls
What Is Not?
- The UI is not the most intuitive.
- Lots of video editing tools are hidden under the menu tools.
Cloudinary
Disparate CloudConvert, Cloudinary is an enterprise-level image compression explication. If your web portal deals with lots of video data, you can use the Cloudinary API to compress and convert videos on the fly. Then, Cloudinary has a free variant which is limited to 200 minutes of video compression per month. You should implement the API within your web app code, and there is enough documentation available on the Cloudinary site.
What Is Good?
- On-the-fly image & video compression
- Lots of documentation available on the Internet page
- The free version would suffice the need of most individual blogs
- Search images utilizing the API
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is the go-to app when it comes to anything except media. If you don’t have FFmpeg installed already, utilize the following command to do it.
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
FFmpeg can handle many file formats and has various switches to customize video codec, output bitrate, etc.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 20 output.mp4Some higher the CRF value, the smaller is the file size & decrease in video quality. Then, you can use the CRF value as 0 if you want lossless compression. But, that would lead to greater file size.
Whether you have an NVIDIA GPU, it is just a matter of compiling FFmpeg with the NVENC library to help hardware-accelerated compression.
What Is Good?
- Supports a massive number of codecs & file types
- Custom controls & switches to control the video compression
What Is Not?
- File conversion takes a long time.
- Compiling FFmpeg with GPU supports is a difficult job.
Handbrake
We have been applying Handbrake on all our machines ranging from Windows, Linux to macOS. This just works flawlessly, leading to significant low file size without a considerable deterioration in video quality. You can modify the video quality by dragging the RF slider on the Video tab. Any higher RF number reduces the video quality whereas and a lower number increases it. Besides these, you also get filters to deinterlace and determine which comes in handy in case you are compressing/restoring an old video stored on DVDs.
Even Handbrake supports batch video compression, wherein you can add multiple videos to the queue and compress all of them at once. This only problem with Handbrake is that the options are quite overwhelming & have the right learning curve. In case you are into video production, it is well worth investing time to learn it.
What is Good?
- Many built-in presets for various social media sites and web.
- Capability to add custom presets with user-defined settings.
- Supports H.265 and 10-bit& 12-bit video encoding s
- Support resolution up to 4k & frame rates up to 120 fps.
- Separate tab for audio & video encoding
- Do the GPU cores when available for faster encoding
What is Not?
- Some bugs when adding subtitles to the video
Transmageddon
Transmageddon is a Linux video transcoder application with a minimal interface. This is a dedicated offline Video Compressor application that supports audio codecs, various videos, and output file formats. My favorite feature in Transmageddon is that you go to set codecs for audio and video separately. That ensures that you have maximum control over the compressed file. It is also a neat service to have when you want to extract audio from a video or remove it.
Transmageddon is a neat minimal application for video compression. Nevertheless, this application hasn’t been updated in 2014 and lacks active development.
What is Good?
- Least interface with built-in presets
- Supports a large number of output file formats
- Capacity to set separate audio and video codecs
- Option to rotate videos.
What is Not?
- The application was last updated back in 2014
- No support for H.265 video codec
Ezgif
Another online Application in this list is Ezgif. It is a web application for converting videos from multiple formats to GIF. Though, unlike CloudConvert, you get various editing tools that you let you cut, trim, rotate, speed control, color adjustment, resize, etc. I work the web application majorly for Video Compressor GIF size since it uses LZF compression to reduce GIF size by decoloration, dithering, & noise. Moreover, you can also opt-out for frame drops to decrease the GIF size.
What is Good?
- Supports GIF/JPG/PNG/APNG/WebP & other file formats
- Maximum file size 6MB each or 100MB in total.
- You can select many files or upload the .zip archive with images.
- Many editing tools for adjustment & color grading
- GIF optimizer based on LZF & LZW algorithm with adjustable compression level
What is Not?
- None to complain about
CloudConvert
CloudConvert, as the name recommends, is a cloud-based file conversion app. This supports a massive library of files wherein video compression is just a small part. This helps an enormous number of video file formats, codecs, and audio formats. Besides these, you can customize the compression settings like audio codec, CRF, video codec, etc. Furthermore, CloudConvert also provides APIs so that it can be integrated with your web app. Besides, you can also use Zapier to integrate cloud convert with other apps like AWS, Google Drive, etc.
CloudConvert is a free web application that sheds off the conversion load from your local CPU and GPU. Nevertheless, it does come with some limitations, such as maximum file size can only be up to 1 GB and only compress 25 minutes of video recordings per day. To eliminate these limitations, you can upgrade to the paid version, which will start at $8.
What is Good?
- No sign in required for file conversion
- Compression & transcoding happens on the cloud
- API availability and Zapier integration with other applications
- Because of the Privacy Policy, none of the information is extracted from the uploaded files.
What is Not?
- This Video Compressor speed is also slow for free users.
Final Words :
Video compression is a combination of another ball-park when you read about it. Whether you deal with video production daily, Handbrake is a great tool to learn and adapt to. For a one-time usage case, so you can try Transmageddon or CloudConvert. As a minimal video editor cum Video Compressor, Avidemux and Ezgif is an excellent option.
