

However, FFmpeg can do much more than that.

The instruction ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.webmĬonverts an MP4 video file into a WebM video file. In its simplest form, that is what it does. You've probably used FFmpeg before for converting video and audio files between formats. You can do dozens, nay, scores of things with your videos, without ever having to open a graphical video-editing application.

The same goes, believe or not, for video editing. That would work if you only had one file, but what would you do if you had a filesystem with hundreds of files scattered all over the place? You would never consider seriously trawling through every directory and subdirectory, opening each file in turn, and clicking through the search-and-replace process, would you? A Bash script using find and sed would be the way to go. Say you have to change every instance of "Bill" in a 100-page text file to "Gary." Sure, you could use the search-and-replace feature in your text editor. How much better? Well, it makes stuff easier to batch process, for starters. The following commands view the containers supported by FFmpeg.Below is the video associated with this article. Generally speaking, the suffix name of a video file reflects its container format. There are several common container formats. The video file itself is actually a container, which includes video and audio, and may also have other content such as subtitles. Conceptīefore introducing FFmpeg usage, you need to understand some basic concepts of video processing. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can follow the official documentation to complete the installation first. This article describes how FFmpeg command line can handle video more concisely and efficiently than desktop video processing software. It is powerful and versatile, used extensively in video websites and commercial software (such as Youtube and iTunes), and is the standard encoding/decoding implementation for many audio and video formats.įFmpeg itself is a huge project containing many components and library files, the most commonly used being its command line tools. FFmpeg is the most commonly used open source software for video processing.
