Overcoming GitHub's 100MB Video Limit: Introducing GithubVideoCompressor

My first iteration of this was a chrome extension with ffmpeg.wasm, but there were multiple problems.

1. ffmpeg-wasm uses web-workers to attempt to parallelize the requests, but github has content security policies preventing the creation of web-workers from a chrome extension.

2. We can use the ffmpeg single core version, but the speed ends up being quite slow. I'm not 100% sure why but my best guess is because ffmpeg.wasm doesn't have access or take advantage of the computer's graphics card. The chrome extension background service worker is also only single threaded.

3. I did build a custom ffmpeg.wasm using Jerome Wu's blob as a guide to see if there was anyway to get the compression speed faster https://itnext.io/build-ffmpeg-webassembly-version-ffmpeg-js.... It worked, but was not faster.

The speed difference can be significant. i.e. On my M2 macbook pro I was getting 14 fps compression speed, compared to a 260fps compression speed using native ffmpeg.

This will vary, but I'd say around 5x to 15x improvement, similar to what ch_sm said.

The ffmpeg configuration I use is: ffmpeg -i inputPath -an -c:v libx264 -crf 28 -preset ultrafast output.mp4

Feel free to test it out. If you want to test ffmpeg.wasm on the browser with web-workers, I have a work in progress demo page. The site is not updated yet, but at the bottom on the site you can upload a video and test the FPS of the ffmpeg.wasm on your machine. You will notice small <30MB videos get higher FPS than larger videos.

https://github-video-compressor.vercel.app/

The speed of the compression is important, because I wanted the whole compression + upload to be faster or take just as long as uploading the actual file. This does depend on the computer resources and internet speeds.

By using the native ffmpeg binary, we get the fastest speed possible. I tried a bunch of ffmpeg configurations, this was the fastest one I found that works consistently. Let me know if you anyone knows a faster one.

> It is helpful if you accidentally record more than 100MB (the github limit) for a demo video you wish to put in a Github PR.

In other words, you have a video, you want to attach it to the PR, it's 105MB. Now your option is to put it on YT and share a link, or use this tool and be able to simply drag/drop it to the PR.

In the demo, the 118MB file is compressed to something like 18MB, which is quite impressive, and could also help people who have slow upload speeds.

Screen recording software trade performance for file size, so reencoding it afterwards can result in much smaller file sizes. I've personally had recordings I ~100MB reencode to ~10MB.

2. BossingAround explains it fairly well. It is really about breaking out of Github. When you only want to quickly upload a video, and it break because of 7 extra MB, thats annoying. If you were to use ffmpeg, manually you need to do a few things.

First, you need to know where the video you just recorded is located which may takes you 10 seconds of brain power.

Second, you need to grab the script to compress the video from your notes, or use a alias/macro. (1-5 seconds)

Third you need to find the output video, then drag it back into Github. About (3-10) seconds.

This does not include the actual compressing time.

While this app you install once, and it should just work. When you drop a video into the Github comment field or description box, it will start compressing, then upload like normal. All while the developer can edit the text field. There is little break of the dev's flow.

If you care about maintaining the full 350MB, you can for sure post the video somewhere else, but that takes time, breaks dev flow, and is often not free to host 350MB files. In this use-case the important part is not to maintain the video quality, but that I can still understand and read the text/context in the video.

Also, another use-case for this is to keep these video's off external services. To keep the attack surface area down. The importance of this depends on your own company.

Third. The code is stupidly complex for such a simple thing (I definitely asked myself why am I building this over 20 times), but the actual use and installation of the app is super simple. Installation should take under 10 to 20 minutes. Most of the time is from installing ffmpeg. I tried really hard to make installation as easy as possible.

Once installed, app should just work. You should never need to think about anything. Install once and forget.