Video Squisher: minimal command-line processing on the web
I’ve recently been asked to reduce the size of video files with some regularity, taking in a video file and generating something with reduced file size (“squishing” the video; hence “video squisher”). This is an easy task to accomplish with Handbrake, and since the transcodes I was asked to do were consistent in their needs, I was able to set up a preset in Handbrake to make these conversions very simple.
Unfortunately, there were a few steps that weren’t as easy to automate: namely, grabbing the original video and sharing the transcoded version later. Rather than need to do anything myself for each video, I sought to make my process available for “self-service”, probably as some kind of web-based tool instead. Since the imposition of receiving a file, running it through Handbrake, and sharing the result is fairly small though, I wanted to make this tool as simple as possible.
I believe I succeeded and that the results are interesting enough to share because I discovered a few new tricks that made it easier, so in this post I will describe what I built to meet this need and how it was made.
