A short helper script to decode QuickTime .mov files to mp4 files using default settings. Good for creating short screencasts.

trim-movie.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# A short helper script to decode QuickTime .mov files to mp4 files using default settings.
#
# Usage:
#   ./trim-movie.sh path/to/source.mov path/to/destination.mp4
#   ./trim-movie.sh path/to/source.mov path/to/destination.mp4 1080
#
# The optional third paramater is width. You may need to respecify this if you encounter
# divisibility by 2 errors. Not sufficiently motivated to bother checking the size and
# correcting in the script!
#
# Author: Ben Lopatin
# License: Public domain
#
ffmpeg -i "$1" -vf scale=${3:-720}:-1 -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -strict -2 "$2"