Compress Video to x265 recursively

This script compresses videos to x265 (HEVC) from one location to another recursively without overwriting the destination.

Features

• Open Source bash script
• Can run on Linux and Windows WSL
• Can be run in a tmux session in the background
• Compress all videos in subfolders and copy folder structure to destination
• No complicated switches
• If terminated, can be restarted and will not overwrite already created files
• Will not delete or overwrite any existing files
• Will not recompress a source video that's already in h265 (HEVC) format.
• Has the option to select your desired Bitrate

Requirement

The script uses ffmpeg and can be install on Debian/Ubuntu based systems or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with:

apt install ffmpeg

Windows users, to find out more regarding WSL, use this link.

Download/Install script

To download and use the script, do the following in a folder of your choosing:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DeadLaurin/CompressVideo/main/compress_video.sh
chmod +x compress_video.sh

Now the script is ready to use. You could move the script to somewhere in your PATH if you'd like to access it from anywhere.

Usage

./compress_video.sh [-e EXTENSION] [-s SOURCE] [-d DESTINATION] [-b BITRATE]
        -e EXTENSION        Mandatory: Specify the file extension to filter on source. Eg: -e mkv
        -s SOURCE           Mandatory: Specify the source folder to compress from. Eg: -s /mnt/myvideos
        -d DESTINATION      Mandatory: Specify the destination folder to compress to. Note that files 
                                       will not be overwritten. Eg: -d /home/user/myvideos
        -b BITRATE        Specify the bitrate quality in kbps. Eg: -b 2000

Example

Compress MKV videos from location /mnt/videos to ~/videos with 2500 Bitrate

./compress_video.sh -e mkv -s /mnt/videos -d ~/videos -b 2500

The output might look like this:

Destination file exists: ~/videos/Season 1/video1.mkv
Destination file exists: ~/videos/Season 1/video2.mkv
Destination file exists: ~/videos/Season 1/video3.mkv
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Compressing  /mnt/videos/Season 1/video4.mkv  with size ( 1280 x 720 ) and with 31081 frames to file  ~/videos/Season 1/video4.mkv
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
x265 [info]: HEVC encoder version 3.6+1-aa7f602f7
x265 [info]: build info [Linux][GCC 13.2.0][64 bit] 8bit+10bit+12bit
x265 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast LZCNT SSSE3 SSE4.2 AVX FMA3 BMI2 AVX2
x265 [info]: Main profile, Level-4 (Main tier)
x265 [warning]: No thread pool allocated, --wpp disabled
x265 [warning]: No thread pool allocated, --lookahead-slices disabled
x265 [info]: Slices                              : 1
x265 [info]: frame threads / pool features       : 3 / none
x265 [info]: Coding QT: max CU size, min CU size : 64 / 8
x265 [info]: Residual QT: max TU size, max depth : 32 / 1 inter / 1 intra
x265 [info]: ME / range / subpel / merge         : hex / 57 / 2 / 3
x265 [info]: Keyframe min / max / scenecut / bias  : 23 / 250 / 40 / 5.00
x265 [info]: Lookahead / bframes / badapt        : 20 / 4 / 2
x265 [info]: b-pyramid / weightp / weightb       : 1 / 1 / 0
x265 [info]: References / ref-limit  cu / depth  : 3 / off / on
x265 [info]: AQ: mode / str / qg-size / cu-tree  : 2 / 1.0 / 32 / 1
x265 [info]: Rate Control / qCompress            : ABR-1500 kbps / 0.60
x265 [info]: tools: rd=3 psy-rd=2.00 early-skip rskip mode=1 signhide tmvp
x265 [info]: tools: b-intra strong-intra-smoothing deblock sao
frame=28275 fps= 15 q=20.0 size=  280320KiB time=00:18:04.79 bitrate=2116.9kbits/s speed=0.557x