Shrink-Ray

A Windows desktop app that scans a folder for videos and re-encodes them to smaller AV1 files. It only replaces an original when the new file is actually smaller, and originals go to the Recycle Bin (recoverable).

Requirements

• Windows 10/11
• Python 3.12+ with tkinter (standard) and Pillow (pip install pillow)
• ffmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH (https://ffmpeg.org)
• Optional: an NVIDIA GPU with AV1 NVENC (RTX 40/50 series) for fast encoding

Run

Double-click Shrink-Ray.bat (launches with no console window).

How it works

1. Pick a folder (or choose a recent one from the dropdown) and SCAN.
2. Review the list; uncheck anything you want to skip.
3. COMPRESS CHECKED.

For each file it encodes to a temporary .mkv, and only if that is smaller than the original does it send the original to the Recycle Bin and put the new file in its place. No savings -> the original is left untouched.

Settings

• Quality (CRF) - lower = better quality / bigger (default 32).
• Speed (preset) - higher = faster / less compression (default 7).
• Min size - skip files smaller than this during scan.
• Encoder - GPU (NVIDIA NVENC, fast) or CPU (libsvtav1, smaller files). GPU is the default when a compatible card is detected.
• Include subfolders - scan recursively.
• Skip files already AV1 - don't re-encode AV1 sources.
• Copy audio when possible - stream-copy the audio instead of re-encoding to Opus 128k (faster, no audio quality loss; off by default for maximum size reduction).

Notes

• Output is always .mkv (robust container for AV1 + any audio/subtitles).
• Remembered folders are stored in shrink_ray_config.json (delete it to reset). shrink_ray.ico is regenerated on every launch.
• One file is processed at a time (the encoder already uses the hardware fully).