Downscale Videos

Downscale Videos is my helper tool for videos ripped from DVDs or obtained from other sources, standardizing them across my network for streaming. One prescription — capped resolution (480p), framerate (24 fps), and audio bitrate (96 kbps), plus optional CRF compression — applied recursively and idempotently: compliant files are skipped, originals are replaced only after a successful transcode.

Source on GitHub

Highlights

  • Decide, then act: probes resolution, framerate, and audio bitrate (MoviePy + ffprobe) and transcodes only the files out of spec — running it twice changes nothing.
  • Never upscales: a 360p file stays 360p; audio streams are copied untouched unless they exceed the cap.
  • Newest-first batch processing: --recursive walks the tree most-recently-modified first; per-file errors skip and continue.
  • Atomic-ish replacement: output goes to a _resized sibling and is swapped in only on a clean FFmpeg exit.
  • Live progress: precomputed frame counts and FFmpeg stdout parsing produce a real percent-complete readout per file.
  • Python + FFmpeg CLI with limit overrides (--height-limit, --rate-limit, --bitrate-limit, --compression-factor) and preserved metadata.

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