TLDR: Curtail losslessly compresses photos without losing date/time metadata. What program like Curtail can do the same with video’s (preferably with MKV support)?
Curtail is FOSS Software for Linux that I’ve found extremely helpful. It’s designed to bulk losslessly compress your images and photos without losing the date & time metadata in them. I’ve found this really helpful for skimming down the overall storage-use of my photo’s.
But the thing that takes the most space on my PC is video’s. You see, I record all of my videogame gameplay and store them on a hard drive. This takes many hundreds of gigabytes of space and is ever-increasing; and compressing them without losing any quality while retaining the date & time metadata is invaluable to me.
I’d love a program that functionally acts the same as curtail, but losslessly compresses each individual frame of a video rather than a photo. Curtail doesn’t provide this, so does anybody know of any programs I can use that do this? MKV support is preferable, as that is how I store my video’s, but still tell me about it even if it doesn’t support MKV.
I don’t think it’s possible, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Encoding a video with lossless flags usually results in a file size bigger or about the same as the source, and on top of that it takes a long time to actually do the encode.
Video is already highly compressed.
But for sure you can tinker around with ffmpeg (FOSS) & see how it goes for you. I’ve done it in the past just for kicks since some of the common video codec encoders do have lossless flags but it really wasn’t worth the effort.
EDIT: That’s just the video in the file, you also have to contend with the audio. That’s a bit easier if you just want to use ffmpeg to dump everything into FLAC but again, I don’t think you’re saving much hard drive space if any.