How to use Bash script to find .mov files recursively and convert them to .mp4 using ffmpeg

Question

I'm working on a Mac system in a video company where I have to clean up a lot of folders and subfolders containing large intermediate video files.

So I've been looking for a way to batch convert many .mov files to h.264 .mp4 files using ffmpeg. I've found several codes to do a batch convert using a script similar to

for f in '*.mov';
   do ffmpeg -i $f -c:v libx264 -f mp4 "${%f.mov}.mp4" ; 
done

However this only works on the current folder the script is run in, while I'm looking for a way to find .mov files recursively, and batch convert them all.

At the moment, the solution that works for me feels a little brute-force; I'm just using find and execute ffmpeg;

 find . -name '*.mov' -type f -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libx264 -f mp4 {}.mp4 

However, One of the problems I'm having, is that I can't seem to substitute the .mov for .mp4 in this formatting, so the output will add .mp4 to the {}, with files ending up as *.mov.mp4

Besides that, I'm guessing this isn't the most secure or the nicest way of going about rendering a batch.

I was wondering if there is a more secure or less terminal-intense way of creating a batch for ffmpeg, that might even solve my naming problem, or a way to make the 'for f in *mov' command find videos recursively up to 5+ folders deep.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is a simple bash script that will do what you want (I think): 1) recursively find all MOV files and convert them, 2) properly replace the .mov file extension with a .mp4 file extension.

#!/bin/bash
while read mov; do
  mp4=$(echo "$mov"|sed -e 's|\.mov$|.mp4|i')
  if [ "$mov" == "$mp4" ]; then
    echo "Failed to generate unique MP4 filename for file $mov"
    exit 1
  fi
  echo ffmpeg -i "$mov" -c:v libx264 -f mp4 "$mp4"
done < <(find . -type f -iname '*.mov')

As written, this won't actually do the conversion, it just echoes the ffmpeg command that will be run. Once you are sure it will do what you want, simply remove the "echo" from in front of the ffmpeg command.

Answer 2

does this help?

for i in `find . -name "*.mov" -print0| xargs -0`; do echo ffmpeg -i $i -c:v libx264 -f mp4 ${i%.mov}.mp4; done

remove the echo if you are satisfied with the ffmpeg command that is generated.

this takes into account filenames containing one or more spaces (via -print0 and xargs -0)