It is important that I compress the mp4 recordings to a reasonable size that doesn’t compromise quality, because I post these recordings on a website so that my students can watch them later. So, I should be able to make do with far fewer frames per second than what my recording device assume when it produces the mp4.

I seldom include full-motion video in my lectures, and the video changes far more slowly than the audio.

I have a device that records my lectures straight to mp4, capturing whatever I put on my computer screen and whatever I say into the mic, but the resulting mp4s are not as small as they could be. As a teacher who records his lectures, I need to do this. In this article, I create an application that takes mp4 files and compresses them further before posting them to a web server. But, as I describe how I programmed the application, hopefully I’ll communicate the basics of media compression and file system operations in Python effectively enough that you can take these lessons and apply them to whatever you want to create.

In this tutorial, I’m going to create a ridiculously specialized app that might not have relevance to anyone but me.

Ffmpeg compress video file