Unlike centralized social media your videos aren't automatically optimized on Nostr. Her are some good tools to compress your videos for smaller size and better streaming before upload.
🔹Android
FFshare - Open source, ffmpeg based
https://github.com/caydey/ffshare
Proton - Google Play Store
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arthur.hritik.proton.video.compressor
🔹Desktop - both are available for Linux, Mac & Windows.
Handbrake
FFmpeg
we could be doing a lot better job though
True. I see a lot of 1 minute videos that are triple digit MB in size. A lot can easily be compressed by a factor of ten.
I don’t know about videos but it would be nice if we converted image files into JPEG XL, because it has inherited a party trick from FLIF where you only need to i.e. download half of the file to have half of the resolution.
Should save on bandwidth and file storage, since you don’t need redundant tumbnails and alternative resolution files.
Totally need this. Suggestions for ffmpeg?
Handbrake uses FFmpeg under the hood, so if you like a GUI that's probably the best option. For using FFmpeg directly, any LLM should be able to do a good job of devising the correct command line to do whatever you want. For Nostr I use h264 for the video codec for widest compatibility.
Thanks, anything else I should know about nitrate resolution, etc?
I usually drop the resolution for social media posting personally, 480 or 720 is fine. For the bitrate look into the crf (Constant Rate Factor) option. The higher you set this the lower the bitrate. Depending on the video it can save a lot of space without losing too much quality.
`-c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset slow` is a good baseline and adjust from there.
A pretty in depth article covering FFmpeg.
Don't listen to the H264 part. VP9 (or AV1) should come before H264. Can do both if a platform requires H264.
Don't chase compatibility by doing shit wrong to be compatible with other people doing shit wrong. If you post a video on nostr correctly, it won't show in Primal because Primal sucks - don't pretend that's the good tech's fault
https://video.nostr.build/5bd2630854421ea1c235aaec97f8c69f5eac4c65fa804acbfe2324bb51ae4340.webm
Here's an example of a video posted on nostr correctly - it doesn't show in Primal for me because Primal sucks and dickrides H264/MP4, but Ryan wants you to make that your problem by letting Primal demand you suck the same
I do agree with the ffmpeg/handbrake recommendations though
I know nostr:nprofile1qqsfnz2sqsflkatdssmeztxr90s8xrd7r07xkhfwaa6eu9zkcguljpgprpmhxue69uhkc6t8dp6xu6twvaex2mrp0yhxxmmdqyv8wumn8ghj7am9d33k7mt99ehx7um5wgh8w6twv5q3kamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwphhyar9d4hkuetjduhxxmmdh047hg would appreciate people using these.
You can also do some file size reduction in your video editing software at export. Using LumaFusion on my phone I made a 47 sec video at 57MB. I’m guessing that sort of thing can help?
That's a good start. For social media these can take it even further. Get that 58 down to single digits.
Thanks Ryan that's really helpful, that's why you're the cream of the crop.
More people will watch your video if it loads quickly. Media optimization for internet use is important. If something doesn't load quickly, people just move on.
Somewhat related subject, can these tools remove metadata as well?
Do you think compression is necessary for iPhone videos?
Any video, yeah. Your phone saves for maximum quality. For posting on the Web you want to optimize for loading speed and bandwidth. Major platforms do this on their servers, Nostr doesn't have this yet unfortunately.
Ok good to know! Thanks Ryan 🙏
Phone videos are the worst. When I move them to other storage I always batch re-encode them.
Images are not optimized either. Plenty of folks with 10mb PFPs around here.
This. When I vibed a game using avatars as game assets the biggest hurdle was optimizing them for use in game. Centralized services doing all the work for you has left most people ignorant of the importance of media optimization for Internet use unfortunately.
