If, like me, you happen to be recording your desktop, which is quite simple and convenient on any current operating system (including ChromeOS or MacOS), sooner or later you may run into a disk space issue.

From time to time, when I’m working on new configurations or playing around with new technology, it’s easy to record everything and then follow the main steps when documenting. When something goes wrong, it’s frustrating to have to delete the entire document and start over. Instead, I just remove all unnecessary files at the end and preserve the ones I want to refer back to for documentation purposes. Unfortunately, the MOV files generated by the default “screenshot” application take up a lot of space.

This issue can, of course, be solved with MOV file conversion. Followed exampleis extremely efficient (sometimes achieving 10x compression).

#install software -- can take a while
brew install ffmpeg

Below code will work on all “mov” files in (and below) the directory where it is run:

find . -iname "*.mov" | xargs -I % /opt/homebrew/Cellar/ffmpeg/5.1.2_6/bin/ffmpeg -i "%" -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -vf format=yuv420p -movflags +faststart "%".mp4

This task can take a while, sometimes a few hours – depending on your file size.
For that reason, remember to do it when connected to power (if working on a laptop) and ideally after you have finished your work

Check quality of the new files and remove the old one.

FFmpeg is a popular software that can be found on most operating systems.