VLC is a complete video player with conversion features. If you already have VLC installed, you can convert videos & audios without additional software. The purpose of converting is mostly to reduce video size by changing the format to a lossy one, and by removing the audio track from it. It is very handy to do with VLC as shown below. Let's go!
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1. Open the converter
Run VLC and open the menu bar File > Convert/Save (Ctrl+R).
2. Add a video file
Click Add button and select a video file as source video. For example, a 20MB sized video.mp4 file.
3. Conversion
Click Convert / Save button at the bottom so you see a new dialog to configure your conversion. If you need adjustments, see special section at the end.
- Select target video format on Profile (example: Video - Theora + Vorbis (OGG))
- Type target file name (example: converted-video.ogv)
- Click Start button
Video formats you can choose:
- MP4
- OGV
- WEBM
- WMV
Target formats that are considerably smaller in size if you convert a source video to:
- WEBM
- OGV
For example here, converting a high quality MP4 to OGV will reasonably reduce resulting file size.
4. Processing
VLC will show blank screen with its orange logo and its progress bar moving second by second. This is VLC conversion progress. How fast this will take depends on your computer power: stronger means faster.
5. Special Adjustments
Find the special adjustments by wrench icon "Edit selected profile" next to profile selection:
For example, you want to remove the audio track, or deliberately shrink the video resolution, or decrease the bitrate, so resulting video will have smaller file size, you can do it:
Remove audio:
Located at Audio Codec tab: simply uncheck the Audio option there and options below it being greyed out
Located at Video Codec tab: Resolution tab: select Scale between 0.25 - 0.5 - 0.75 to make it smaller.
Decrease bitrate:
Located at Video Codec tab: Encoding parameter tab: determine value at Bitrate box. For example: a full quality MP4 may be at 2mb/s bitrate, decreasing it to 128kb/s will decrease the file size a lot but still keep the quality.
Combining those three options should give you smaller file size you would love. You will need to try them out several times to find out best combination. Go ahead!
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.