Converting very large (200 GB) .avi file to mp4 using Matlab

I am trying to convert some .avi files over to .mp4 so they are more manageable. For context, the videos were recorded using old software, so .avi was the only option to save them as. The videos themselves are an hour long which results in video files that are around 200 gb in size. I can convert these videos to .mp4 using VLC media player but there are a lot of videos and I wanted to try using Matlab to just do the conversion over a weekend.

I found this thread: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/471380-how-to-change-video-format-from-avi-to-mp4

and used the example code from Image Analyst to try and convert one of these videos over to .mp4. The video had around 40000 frames and at around 14000 Matlab crashed with the following error:

Warning: Error updating Image.

Update failed for unknown reason.

I suspect it's a memory issue given the size of the video. I'm not familiar with a lot of video editing techniques but I was alternatively thinking of first compressing (however that is done) and then trying to convert, but if it's possible to keep the current video resolution that would be best.

The matrix used to hold the frames is already preallocated. If there is some better preprocessing that should be done before trying to convert the video or if there is a method to segment out the memory usage.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

I would strongly recommend using VLC batch convert; https://www.alphr.com/batch-convert-vlc/

VLC's algorithms can do much better in compression -- and are much faster.

[Tegan Thurston]

Oh! I think the way I was originally doing it could only do one at a time. I will use this instead. Thank you!