Convert videos for twitter/X

Uploading videos to X tends to be prone to errors since they are very picky about what formats they accept. This bash one-liner helps you convert to a format that works.

ffmpeg -i "$1" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -preset slow -vf format=yuv420p -c:a aac -movflags +faststart "${1%.*}_twitter.mp4"

To use this one-liner, save it to a file (e.g. convert_videos) and make it executable with chmod +x convert_videos.

Then, you can run it by passing the input filename as an argument:

./convert_video video_clip.mp4
# output
video_clip_twitter.mp4

This will produce a new video file with the _twitter extension.

What is does:

• uses input video file ($1 in the command)
• strips out the file extension from the filename and attaches _twitter to it
• converts video to X acceptable format