Diet-Video

This is a fork of the original video-diet that is no longer being updated.

This project aims to reduce the spaces of your videos and audios encoding it on hevc.

Why video-diet?

The answer is easy. I have a lot old-movies/videos and music/audios taking a lot of space in the hard-drive. So I'm always short on disk space, the by accident discover de hevc codec. when i need to shrink a video of 3GB to upload it to Telegram, the convertion take my 3GB movie and returned a 300 MB with the same quality 😱. So I decided that I would convert all my video and audio files , but they are a lot, so I build this tool for it.

More info about hevc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding

Installation

$ uv tool install .

This installs the diet-video command. To run it from a checkout without installing it globally, use uv run diet-video.

FFMPEG

In order to run the project you must install ffmpeg.

For Linux

In any linux machine you can get it from your favorite package manager.

For arch:

sudo pacman -S ffmpeg

For Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

For Windows

Download a windows ffmpeg build here https://ffmpeg.org/download.html. Unzip it and change the folder name to FFmpeg. Copy the folder into C:\ and then add the path C:\FFmpeg\bin to the enviroment variables of the system.

To check correct instalation open a new instance of cmd and type:

ffmpeg --version`.

Example

For a file

diet-video file test.mp4

This option conserve the original file

For a folder

diet-video folder ~/Videos

This option replaces the original file for the converted files

Converted files are marked with the Processed with diet-video metadata comment. Future folder runs detect that marker and skip those files, so they are not converted again.

Ignoring files on the folder

diet-video folder ~/Videos --ignore-extension .mp4

This option ignores all the .mp4 files on ~/Videos

diet-video folder ~/Videos --ignore-path ~/Videos/subfolder

This option ignores all the files on ~/Videos/subfolder

To deliberately process an already marked file with the file command, pass --force.

AV1 Support

To use AV1 instead of hevc add --codec av1 to the commnads above and that will use libaom-av1 instad of libx265 to encode the files

Note

The video conversion can take some time. Depending on the original video properties; the conversion time can be longer than the video.

For developers

Requirements

Install uv, then run:

$ uv sync

The project requires Python 3.13 or newer. uv will download a compatible Python version automatically when one is not already available.

Run the command with uv run diet-video and the test suite with uv run pytest.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

Good luck 😉.

Project Structure based on awesome tutorial by @tiangolo at https://typer.tiangolo.com/tutorial/package