How to use ffmpeg to compress avi and mp4 files

I've written an article about some tricks you can do with ffmpeg, in today's article, I will show you another trick - compressing avi and mp4 video files with a simple command with a only a small loss in video quality.

If you dont have ffmpeg already installed, you can run this command to install it in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros:

sudo apt-get install libav-tools

To compress an avi video file using ffmpeg, the command you can use is:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -vcodec msmpeg4v2 output.avi

To compress an mp4 video file using ffmpeg, the command will be somewhat different:

ffmpeg -i input.pm4 -acodec mp2 output.mp4

In both commands, replace the input filenames with a specific file, after the compressing process is done, you will have an output file in the same folder.