Endless space

Videos are the easyest way to consume storage space. It can be on the phone or in the photo album.

Meanwhile the videos are there, waiting to be played someday, if even this happen and storage is not a problem. It will remain with the size it was created.

Problem

Running out of space always happen in the worst time. You need to complete a work, but the disk is full. You need to install another app, but memory is full.
One way to solve is to change size, resolution and encoding. Here are some of my settings using ffmpeg

The best one

The others are just for historical archive, use this one and you are good to go.
First put the name of the file in a variable, trust me it will make your life easier.

export videofile=<videofile.mp4|mov|...>

Then run the command

ffmpeg -y -i $videofile -c:v libx264 -preset medium -b:v 555k -pass 1 -c:a
aac -b:a 128k -f mp4 /dev/null && \
ffmpeg -i $videofile -c:v libx264 -preset medium -b:v 555k -pass 2 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -s 1280x720 output.mp4

You may change the output file name and some setting like the video size.
The result is impressive, a .MOV video with a size of 506MB can be reduced to 13.5MB, a small video of 34.9MB drop to 755KB.

Quality

Yes, quality will be lost. It depend on what you want with the videos. On ordinary days that you need to send a video by mail or load on a Jira kanban board. to describe something, such low resolution video will do the work and you will maintain the record without burning GBs.