I have a 5.3GB mpeg4 file (of the just released ‘From Bedrooms to Billions: Amiga Years‘ documentary about the Commodore Amiga – I haven’t watched it yet but may post a review later), and the size of this single file is giving me some issues 🙂
It’s too large for a FAT32 formatted flash drive, since the largest file you can store on that file system is 4GB. It’s also too large to burn to a 4.7GB single-sided DVD. So I could have reformatted a flashdrive to exFAT (I don’t think the PS4 reads NTFS drives, and my Mac won’t write to NTFS, at least not without other drivers), but the easiest option is probably to split the file to smaller parts.
Now, if you’ve done any video editing before, rendering 1080p video and any amount of transcoding to different formats takes a ton of time. I didn’t want to recode the video or change the format in any way, I just wanted to split the file.
Turns out ffmpeg will do exactly this, and to split into 2x 1hr15m smaller files only took a few minutes on my i7 Mac. I took suggestions from this question, and ended up with these two commands:
ffmpeg -i inputfile.mp4 -ss 00:00:00.0 -c copy -t 01:15:00.0 outputfile-pt1.mp4
ffmpeg -i inputfile.mp4 -ss 01:15:00.0 -c copy outputfile-pt2.mp4
The first one takes input from the start and for 1hr15mins writes to the output file, and the second starts from 1hr15min into the input file and writes the remainder from that point onwards to the second output file.