A simple tale of automating a simple task.

The Problem

One of the greatest joys of programming is saving time and sanity automating tasks. I recently ran into a problem where quicktime movies exported as .mov from osx Catalina were not opening on a osx Yosemite. I found that exporting as .mp4 in quicktime wasn't sufficient, but doing so in iMovie worked.

While the 100 or so clips could have been manually converted and exported in iMovie, the process would have been tedious. This is the spark of books like Automate the Boring Stuff: if you face a task that boils down to "do something over and over", you can probably automate it!

The Solution

I went with FFmpeg to convert the files using the command line. On OSX I would recommend installing with homebrew (brew install ffmpeg).

I copied all movie files to a separate folder and toyed with different conversion codecs. You can inspect the file and view the audio and video codecs in play, so its simply a matter of determining what codecs will work on both systems. In my case, the videos wouldnt play with HEVC encoding, and I needed to specify libx264 for the output video Codec.

I wrote the following bash script to convert all files in the folder with a .MOV extension.

for i in *.MOV; do
    [ -f "$i" ] || break
    ffmpeg -i $i  -c:v libx264 -c:a aac "${i%.*}.mp4"
done

I hope this information can help you!