Shell Scripting

FFmpeg Cheatsheet

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:

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ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp4

To reduce the size further, scale the video to half the width and height:

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ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=iw/2:ih/2" output.mp4

2. Convert a MOV file to MP4

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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:

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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.

Fahd Shariff

Fahd is a software engineer working in the financial services industry. He is passionate about technology and specializes in Java application development in distributed environments.
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Bob
Bob
1 year ago

3 tips to such a complex tool is a cheatsheet ?

Bob
Bob
1 year ago

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

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