A teacher at my school recently had an interesting request. He had hundreds of videos that he had made during COVID-19 that needed to have their file size reduced. The only easy way he could find to do it was by using the online Adobe transcoding service, which meant that he was transcoding one video at a time. As you can imagine, it was cumbersome and time consuming. He asked if there was some better way, and, of course, I immediately thought of HandBrake [1]. HandBrake (Figure 1), an open source video transcoding software, supports virtually all of the popular video formats, codecs, and containers.

Transcoding takes a video file and converts it to a more suitable format for a given application. This can mean changing one or several of the video's characteristics, such as resolution, bitrate, codec, container, encoded audio, subtitles, or color space. With my colleague's files, the file size of each video could be reduced, while still maintaining high enough quality that the viewers wouldn't be missing out on any meaningful content, by transcoding the video files from 1080p x264 MP4 format down to 720p x265 MP4 format files.

HandBrake works on all three major platforms and can deal with nearly any video file. However, it isn't for the faint of heart. I knew right away that it wasn't something that my colleague would be keen to learn, which gave me the idea of using a feature in HandBrake that watches a directory, automatically transcodes any video files added to that directory into a predetermined format, then outputs that transcoded file into an output directory.

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