Handbrake is a fantastic tool for (among other uses), converting videos into mobile formats. It is extremely easy to use and can usually get a video properly converted in just a few clicks. To get Videos encoded for use on my phone, I use the “iPhone & iPod Touch” preset. It will convert your video to .mp4 as well as scall it down to a consumable size. This format will work on any smartphone I’ve seen.

My issue is that when converting a folder full of videos, I don’t want to have to use the gui to add a bunch of videos to the queue one by one. It’s a very clicky process. This simple bash script will walk handbrake through all the files in a selected folder:

#!/bin/bash
for file in "$1"/*
do
	echo 'HandBrakeCLI -i "${file}" -o "${file}.mp4" --preset="iPhone & iPod Touch"""'
	HandBrakeCLI -i "${file}" -o "${file}.mp4" --preset="iPhone & iPod Touch"""
done

Save that into a .sh file like “handbrakefolder.sh”

Now you can simply execute this script against a folder containing your video files. like this:

hostname% ls Videos
Video1.avi
Video2.avi
Video3.avi
hostname% ./handbrakefolder.sh Videos
...
...
...
hostname% ls Videos
Video1.avi
Video1.avi.mp4
Video2.avi
Video2.avi.mp4
Video3.avi
Video3.avi.mp4

Why? Because i’m lazy. I’ll update this to see if it works
#!/bin/sh
#your current site will be backed up to your home folder with the date in the name
#change this to whatever you want
BACKUPNAME="wordpress_site_b4_update"
BACKUPDATE=`date +%y%m%d`
#this is the path to your wordpress site's root
SITEROOT="/usr/local/www/"
#here she goez...
cd ~
tar -pczf "$BACKUPNAME""$BACKUPDATE".tar.gz "$SITEROOT"
cd /usr/local
fetch http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
rm latest.tar.gz
cp -R wordpress/* "$SITEROOT"/
rm -R wordpress
chown -R www "$SITEROOT"