Rotate and convert videos automatically to h264 in the shell

Recently I had the luck to welcome my daughter on earth. I almost welcomed her with my smartphone in my hand recording a video. Actually I did not! But later I did a lot of videos.

I wonder how to not fill up my disk in a few weeks I had to compress them without loosing too much quality.

This is my solution: 

#!/bin/bash
#set -e
set +x

size=-1

function determineMaxVideoSize(){
        local source=$1
        local width=$(exiftool $source | grep -i "^Image Width" | sed -e 's#.*: ##');
        local height=$(exiftool $source | grep -i "^Image Height" | sed -e 's#.*: ##');

        local max=$(($width>$height ? $width : $height));

        if [ $max -gt 1280 ];
        then
                size=hd720;
        else
                size=$width"x"$height;
        fi
}

function _convert(){
        local source=$1
        local target="$1.avi"
        if [ -f $target ];
        then
                echo "skipping '$source', because '$target' already exists"
        else
                # exiftool comes with libimage-exiftool-perl
                local rotation=$(exiftool $source | grep -i ^Rotation | sed -e 's#.*: ##');

                declare -A videoFilter
                videoFilter=(
                        [90]='transpose=1' \
                        [180]='transpose=1,transpose=1' \
                        [270]='transpose=1,transpose=1,transpose=1' \
                );

                determineMaxVideoSize $source;

                local metadata=$(tempfile)
                avconv -y -i $source -f ffmetadata $metadata

                echo "rotation: $rotation"
                local videoFilter="-vf ${videoFilter[$rotation]}"
                if [ $rotation == 0 ];
                then
                        videoFilter="";
                fi

                cmd="avconv -xerror -i $source \
                        -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160000  `# mp3 160kB/s` \
                        -vcodec libx264 -maxrate 2500k -bufsize 1000000 -r 25 -s $size $videoFilter `# 25fps, 1280x720` \
                        $target.tmp.avi \
                        -i $metadata -map_metadata 1 -map 0 `# add dumped metadata`"

                $cmd && \
                        mv $target.tmp.avi $target && \
                        touch -r "$source" "$target"
        fi
}

export -f _convert
export -f determineMaxVideoSize

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*MOV" -o -name "*3gp" -o -name "*mp4" | xargs -n1 -I {} bash -c '_convert {}'
I decided to save the script as convertCamVideo2ArchivVideo.sh in ~/bin. So you can run it from everywhere as this path is already in PATH.

For me it is running perfectly well.

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