HP-97 / Compressor

A PowerShell script written with a GUI to compress video files

Compressor

A Powershell script written with a GUI to compress video files. This is done by using FFmpeg.

It is currently hard-coded to output a video file around a size of 8MB.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Powershell 7

  It is recommended to use PowerShell 7.0.X

  Powershell 7.0.X can be downloaded at https://github.com/PowerShell/powershell/releases

  Note:

  • The script was formally tested using PowerShell 7.0.3.
  • The script will definitely not work with PowerShell 5 and older. Powershell 6 may work but has not been tested.

• FFmpeg

  NOTE: Since release 0.2.0, the GitHub release will now contain two separate .zip releases, where one .zip file will contain FFmpeg executables from the GPL variant, and the other .zip file only contains the program.

  FFmpeg builds for Windows can be downloaded at https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds/releases

  FFmpeg will need to be set up in PATH if you are using Compress_without_FFmpeg_X.X.X. Instructions can be found here: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/20495/how-do-i-set-up-and-use-ffmpeg-in-windows

Execution

Enable execution of PowerShell scripts (Replace CurrentUser with your username):

PS> Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope CurrentUser

Usage

1. Run compressForm.ps1 to open the GUI

.\compressForm.ps1

The following window should appear:

2. Drag any video files you wish to compress into the list box. Only the shown supported video extensions are currently supported. More video extensions will be added in future releases.

   Non-supported files will be rejected.

3. Once all the target video files have been dragged in, press Compress all to begin compressing all of the listed video files. The compression process will be logged in the Powershell console the GUI is running from.

   The resulting compressed video file will be found in the same directory as the source file with an appended _compressed added to the name. The original video file is not modified.

Example:

Source file: C:\Videos\VideoClip.mp4
Result file: C:\Videos\VideoClip_compressed.mp4

Licenses

This project uses the following project:

• FFmpeg, licensed under GPLv2.0

Known Issues

Maximum Path Length Limitation

On Windows 10, Version 1607 and older, there is a MAX_PATH limitation of 260 characters.

The script currently does not take this into account. If the MAX_PATH limit is active, it is highly likely that the script will fail when dealing with paths that approach the character limit.

Output file's file size is greater than the specified threshold

For most videos, the output compressed file will be below the specified filesize threhold. However, there are some cases where this is not the case. I am still currently investigating a better formula to accurately calculate the required average bitrate.