H.265 makes video files 94% smaller (at the same quality)

I recently bought a MacBook Air (why did I not do this 10 years earlier? Because the M1 was not invented yet. Also because money).

For me this is new and unexplored land. A foray into a whole new eco system. I'm working with macOS (Big Sur) for the very first time. 

I always loved using shortcuts and so one of the first things I Ducked was how to make screenshots.

I immediately fell in love with ⌘+SPACEBAR 😍.  But also, I discovered that there are a variety of ways to make screenshots. 

Basically, in windows one would press the PRINTSCREEN button and you would have a screenshot of your whole screen in the local clipboard.

Now, on MacOS there exists a similar command, ⌘ SHIFT 3 will make a screenshot al right. But not to the clipboard, but rather it will save the screenshot to your desktop (saving you tons of time). But what if I only want the screenshot on my clipboard? 

The commands

•  ⌘ SHIFT CTRL 3 will make a screenshot of the whole screen, on clipboard
•  ⌘ SHIFT CTRL 4 will make a screenshot of the selected area, on clipboard
•  ⌘ SHIFT 5 will let you pick a running app, but It will also let you do screen recording.

Being the natural experimenter that I am, I quickly played around with these buttons and once by accident made 4 hour screen recording session of about 20GBs. Oops. 

MacOs makes these recordings in a very accessible format, namely 

Now, mucking about on the Terminal.app (command line for non-Appleonians) I quickly learned the bliss of Brew.SH

 (equivalent of apt-get on linux). One very useful and free/open source app that I installed was 

FFMPEG

. This nifty command line tool allows you to convert an audio/video file into a different format, or convert to a different codec. 

I don't know why this is, but It made me wonder "what if I convert my screen recordings from H.264 to H.265?"

Well, two things happend:

1. My files shrink to 6% (not a type) of their original size (906 MB for 31 minutes to 50,3 MB)  😱
2. Also, my MacBook Air get very warm 😓

I did some more tests with different files of different sizes and different resolutions, but the results scale similarly. 

H.265 makes for VERY SMALL files indeed. Strangely enough, Quicktime doesn't recognise the FFMPEG H.265 output files….

• Some more Ducking made me aware that using '-tag:v hvc1' in FFmpeg creates files that QuickTime can eat.

I have no idea how it is able to video's in my photos.app, they are after all also in H.265, right?

Anyways, for now my conclusion is: always use H.265 and buy a actively cooled MacBook Pro next time 🤔 

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