Command line: FFmpeg

Options
Examples

The swiss army knife for interacting with multimedia files (except images because ImageMagick).

Options

The FFmpeg command line interface is mostly picky because of order. Whatever options are given will be processed with those options in order.

-hide_banner - hide the annoying banner
-loglevel [level] | -v [level] - set the verbosity level
-codecs - list all codecs
-devices - list all devices
-i [file] - the input file
c [codec] - set the codec
-b [rate] - set the bitrate
-o [file] - set the output

Certain options have the option of specifying whether you're interacting with the audio or video track. For example, -codec:audio (-c:a) to set the audio codec.

Examples

FFmpeg is comprehensive and so needs some specific examples to fill my monkey brain.

Convert an MP3 to OGG

ffmpeg -i $INPUT.mp3 -o $OUTPUT.ogg

By default, FFmpeg will guess if certain things are missing. In this case, it guessed the input file is an MP3 and wants to convert OGG. Sometimes, it will also use default options for converting between two formats such as the default bitrate and codec.

Transrate an audio file

ffmpeg -i $INPUT -c $CODE -b:a $BITRATE $OUTPUT

List all available options

FFmpeg has compile options, heaps of them. You may want to know what codecs are available.

ffmpeg -codecs

It tends to be a large list so prepare to send it through a pager.

You should also know FFmpeg can print out devices.

ffmpeg -devices

Capture video device

# Assuming /dev/video0 is your webcam.
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 cringe-at-yourself.mpg

Extract a segment from a file

The timestamps are essentially seeking to a file. For more information, see FFmpeg documentation.

ffmpeg -nostdin -i $INPUT -ss 00:05:22 -to 00:22:43 $OUTPUT

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