HOWTO: Make your videos 10 minutes in length for YouTUBE

I recently made quite a number of videos, that span about 0.5hr or 1-hour in length. YouTube accepts videos that are 10-minutes long and up to 2GB in size. Blip.tv allows FTP uploads, but your filesize cannot exceed 1GB per video. An hour long video from the camera is about 2GB in size. This is quick guide as to how I split videos.

QTCoffee exists to solve this problem. Quick, simple install on Mac OS X, and I was on my way to creating split videos. The command I used:

splitmovie -o outputfile.mov -self-contained -no-fast-start -duration 10:00 sourcefile.avi

Now, in that directory, I get outputfile-1.mov, outputfile-2.mov, and so on. Easy as pie. Its donation-ware, but a commercial license will set you back USD$10. It occasionally reminds you to donate by popping up nagware in your web browser at random once every 10 times its used (I’ve not used shareware since Windows 3.1, and nag screens were a lot different back then). You can easily remove it (it tells you how, even!), by executing: defaults write com.pair.3am.QTCoffee BugMe NO .

Now YouTube is happy, and you can concatenate the files together as a playlist.

QTCoffee is ideal for me, because its scriptable, and can work on a large directory of videos. I wonder what the Linux variant for this is?

2 Comments

  1. ShaolinTiger says:

    I generally use ffmpeg for all video related fudging on linux.


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