Hi @swaectech
We don’t currently have a way to compress videos already uploaded to Studio. The reason for this is video compression takes a very long time and not suitable for online servers—even on a powerful desktop computer, video compression can take hours.
The best way to get small videos files is to compress them locally using handbrake or one of the automated scripts that call ffmpeg, and upload the compressed version to Studio.
a “ricecooker” program that can be run, …
Yes ricecooker can help you with this. Assuming you have all the local files on your computer and you know a little bit of Python, then you can bulk-upload the videos by specifying the info for each video like this. Once you have prepared the python script, if you run it by specifying --compress argument on the command line, each of the videos will be processes with ffmpeg before uploading to Studio.
If this is something you might want to try, you should read the Getting Started tutorial for step-by-step info about how this works.
Note uploading content via ricecooker can only be used to create new channel and not to “update” existing channels, but you can later use the “Import from Channel” to organize the videos in Studio any way you want.
compress one video at a time, delete the exiting video, then move the compressed one into the same folder on the Kolibri server.
Nice hack! Yes once the files are already on Kolibri (in the content/storage/ directory) you can replace them with compressed version (so long as you keep the same filename) and Kolibri will play the new ones. I wouldn’t recommend this approach though, since the changes you make are only for this device and you will not be able to export or share the files to another computer. This is because Kolibri does an integrity check to ensure the file contents match the filename, so if you’ve changed the file Kolibri will think the file is incomplete or corrupted).
Ivan