Re: Script to conditionally find and compress files recursively

J Newman <jenniferkatenewman@gmail.com> writes:

It's true that you cannot tell within the first 5 seconds what the
ultimate compression ratio will be, but it seems to me (from
compressing avi/mp4/mov files with lzma -9evv) that you can tell
within +/- 5% to a high degree of confidence, what the ultimate
compression ratio will be given the first 5 seconds.

Well then, I believe the solution was already posted. Grab 5% of your
files with dd and see how it compresses.

I'm a little curious, what kind of space savings do you expect to get by
doing this? And wouldn't it make more sense to re-encode for lower
bitrate if space saving is your goal?