This will convert your .mov to .mp4 (no audio), decreasing your file size (eg. my last video went from 31mb to 3mb), and mastodon will not compress your video too much.
@stephann that's not quite correct, you're not converting to a mp4 file with no audio, you're converting to a mp4 file with mp2 audio which most mastodon servers likely won't have installed due to license reasons, so they fail to convert it on upload and just leave out the audio. (if they do have it installed, you'll have audio though!) Instead of "-acodec mp2" use "-an" to simply not transcode the audio, this will also run faster and be a smaller file.
@stephann np, ffmpeg is a great tool, once you learn how the flags work it starts to become second nature. Also don't forget to use it's paired ffprobe tool to inspect video files, a handy trick on most upload sites is to download the transcoded version and inspect it to get the exact settings the site uses for audio/video, then use those when you convert with ffmpeg yourself, most sites will then just do a stream copy instead of re-converting, keeping better quality.
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