While working on a file uploading service, we had special considerations for video. Our underlying infrastructure is a mix of homebrewed k8s-cluster magic and AWS-flavored S3 buckets. We had some rules for uploaded videos, they must be less than 500MB, they must be mp4 and so on.
I needed videos to test with of various sizes, specifically sizes I could control and then later distribute.
Step 1
You need an initial video.
These Big Buck Bunny videos are great for this purpose. They’re publically available and they’re a well known testing video. I suppose you could make your own branded logo swooshing video too, but that’s a lot more work.
What’s also great about the Big Buck Bunny videos is the site provides a variety of base filesizes. You can use the 1MB just as well as the 30MB files. Your math will change a bit though.
Step 2
You need ffmpeg. If you don’t have that, grab it via brew install ffmpeg and prepare for a nap while that installs.
This is the command template I use to repeat a video on a loop X-times. This isn’t a soft-loop, this is a real segment repeated X-times. It balloons your filesize like there is no tomorrow. Use it with care.
ffmpeg -stream_loop X -i ./input.mp4 -c copy output.mp4
Using the 1MB file is great of course, it makes the math easier. If you need a 500MB video file, you can generate it 500 in place of X.
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