FFmpeg is a great command-line tool for dealing with audio and video files. Here are some useful commands:
1. Reduce the size of a file
Try passing the file straight through ffmpeg and check if the size reduces:
1 | ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp4 |
To reduce the size further, scale the video to half the width and height:
1 | ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=iw/2:ih/2" output.mp4 |
2. Convert a MOV file to MP4
1 | ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -strict -2 out.mp4 |
3. Create a video from an image by panning across it
If you have a landscape image, first set its height to 1600px, preserving aspect ratio (using an image editor such as IrfanView). Then run the following command to create a video which pans across the image from left to right:
1 | ffmpeg -loop 1 -i input.jpg -vf crop=1200:ih:'min((iw/10)*t,9*iw/10)':0 -t 5 out.mp4 |
Published on System Code Geeks with permission by Fahd Shariff, partner at our SCG program. See the original article here: FFmpeg Cheatsheet Opinions expressed by System Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
3 tips to such a complex tool is a cheatsheet ?
Here is a ffmpeg command I use to extract clips from videos;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:06:00 -c copy -t 00:15:00 output.mp4
which would take a 15 minute clip from the file input.mp4 starting at 6 minutes into the video and write the clip to file output.mp4