Little-espresso NPM

Little Espresso

Features

🎬 High quality video compression - uses the best encoder settings available
📈 Two-pass encoding - for the best possible data distribution
📦 Zero configuration - works right out of the box
✂️ Cross platform - it could probably even work on your phone
🔥 Uses a powerful industry-standard video encoder
😊 Friendly experience - telling you what's going on, from start to finish

Why?

Sharing pictures is a blast. What if you want to share video? Ever hit that file size limit when sending an email? How about you want to share a video extract with someone over Skype? Today, we're surrounded by movie content, yet the hidden difficulty of streaming such vast quantities of data often go unnoticed. Platforms like YouTube make it look easy, that's if you don't mind advertisements, tracking and inappropriate "recommended videos". In 2016, 73% of all internet traffic was video content, and it's only going to rise. It's hands-down the biggest space eater on the internet.

The go-to solution for sharing video is... Upload it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other file host! While this is a fantastic solution for high quality content, it's often unnecessary. I've downloaded gigabytes from Google Drive in Adobe ProRes format for a two minute video, because they guy didn't know a thing about video formats.

Little Espresso makes it easy, with its main focus being on compressing within a certain size limit, such as those imposed by email platforms, while retaining the best quality possible! All videos are encoded at the slowest (but best!) preset with two-pass encoding by default.

Getting started

Advanced installation

I know what I'm doing, just hurry up!

Install Node.js and FFmpeg, and then run

npm i -g little-espresso

The following example uses NVM, which is the recommended way of installing Node.js

# Install FFmpeg
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ffmpeg

# Install NVM
$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

# RESTART TERMINAL

# Install the latest version of node
$ nvm install node
$ nvm use node

# Install little-espresso
$ npm i -g little-espresso

# Now you can use it!
$ cd /home/videos/
$ little-espresso [options] <paths ...>

The equivalent of running little-espresso when installed locally is node node_modules/little-espresso/bin/parse-cli.js. The Node.js module itself exposes a function that can be used to start Little Espresso. The API for this documented in a Typescript Definitions file (index.d.ts);

// Import the function, options interface and the error response interface
const littleEspresso, { ProgramParameters, SpiltEspresso } = require('little-espresso');
const result = littleEspresso({
  resolution: 720,
  framerate: false
});

😎 The Easy way

The easiest way is to download the executable program from the releases page. This is a single executable file that can be placed in any directory. You may either double-click on it to convert everything in the folder at once, or drag-and-drop a file onto the executable. You will still need to install FFmpeg. The good news is you can just place the downloaded ffmpeg.exe (or just ffmpeg for macOS) and ffprobe.exe into the same folder where you put Little Espresso. For a more complete installation, see The Hard way.

😬 The Hard way

The hard part is installing Node.js and FFmpeg. Little Espresso is can be installed with a single line.

Prerequisites

Little Espresso has two dependencies. Node.js and FFmpeg. Node.js is a fantastic runtime environment that's being used by NASA and many, many others. It's built with the language that powers the web, and it's also the only way to get npm, the dominant package manager for web-related things, and the best way to install Little Espresso. FFMpeg is the most famous free video utility out there. It's great!

Windows

Node.js comes with an installer. FFmpeg is more complicated. You will need to download the binaries (latest version, 64-bit, static). For a quick and dirty solution, place the ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe executables in the same folder as the videos you will be converting, however it is recommended to place them somewhere permanent, and then add the location to PATH.

macOS

Node.js comes with an installer. For FFmpeg, it's recommended to install it using HomeBrew. To install Homebrew, visit https://brew.sh, it's very easy. Once that's done, run:

$ brew install node
$ brew install ffmpeg

Linux

You guys know what you're doing. You're playing with big boy stuff.

Installation

Open up a terminal. On Windows, it's called cmd.exe, and on macOS it's Terminal.app. Run the following line of code:

$ npm i -g little-espresso

That's it! This installs Little Espresso globally. The npm command comes bundled with Node.js!

Uninstalling

You may completely uninstall at any time with:

npm rm -g little-espresso

FFmpeg and Node.js are more difficult to uninstall. Ask Google.

Usage

For the easy way users, double-click on the executable, or drag-and-drop a video file onto it. For the hard way users, you may either use one of the provided scripts or you can take advantage of Little Espresso's full potential using command line. Open a new terminal window, and type the following:

$ cd /path/to/your/videos
$ little-espresso

Little Espresso will guide you through the rest with an interactive experience, which can be overridden with command line parameters.

A simpler option for hard-way-users

You can find a quick launch script in the releases section. Download the script for your OS and place it somewhere where there are videos to convert. Double click on the script, and boom! No need to open terminal! It does it all for you!

Command line options

Little Espresso is customizable. You can see a full list of the available flags by running little-espresso --help. Unless explicitly specified, all job-related parameters will be prompted to the user. Full automation may be achieved by using the -r, -f, -s, -e, -t and -F flags.

Usage: little-espresso [options] <paths ...>

Option	What it does

-r, --resolution	Specify the resolution for all files
-f, --framerate	Specify the framerate for all files
-s, --start	Specify the start time for all files
-e, --end	Specify the end time for all files
--no-resolution	Disable resolution operations
--no-framerate	Disable framerate operations
--no-start	Disable start-trimming operations
--no-end	Disable end-trimming operations
--ffmpeg	Full path to FFmpeg binary
--ffprobe	Full path to FFprobe binary
-p, --preset	Change the H264 encoding preset (default: veryslow)
-t, --target	The target file size (default: 8MB)
-h, --help	Show this help menu
-V, --version	Show the program version
-F, --force	Overwrite without asking
--quiet	Disable the bell at the end

Example

$ little-espresso -r 720 -f 30 -s 00:00:05 -e 00:00:10 -t 100MB -F --preset medium "../Videos/Clips" "../OtherStuff/video.mp4"

The ../Videos/Clips/ folder will be recursively scanned for videos, and ../OtherStuff/video.mp4 will also be added to the list. Every found video will be downscaled to a vertical resolution of 720, a framerate of 30, trimmed down to a duration of 5 seconds (00:00:05 → 00:00:10), and encoded with a bitrate to fall just under the 100MB target using the medium preset.

If no paths are specified, the Current Working Directory (.) is used.

$ little-espresso
$ little-espresso .
$ little-espresso ./

Some things to note

If the given resolution is higher than the source content, the source resolution will be used.
if the given framerate is higher than the source content, the source framerate will be used.
For time trimming, auto may be used to keep the original start/end time.
A trim interval beyond the video's timecode may produce an empty file, or just a single frame. No errors are thrown.
Compression accuracy will depend on a lot of factors, incluiding the encoding preset and time constraints.