Last Thursday, I discussed youtube-dl, a tool that allows you to easily download various kinds of media from the web. What happens once you have that media? Or what happens if you want to do something with media you already have?

ffmpeg is almost always the answer. It can take nearly any form of audio or video media and convert it to almost any other form. It can extract clips, transcode media, rotate it, crop it, downsample, upsample, etc. ffmpeg is truly omnivorous.

In fact, many media players and/or transcoders that you may know and love are actually just graphical front-ends for ffmpeg. Handbrake and Plex are two examples that spring to mind.

I’ve spoken about ffmpeg many times in the past, and I’ve often been asked to write a primer on how to use it. To cover every nook and cranny of ffmpeg would take forever, so instead I’ll just cover a handful of examples I find myself using often.

Installation

The easiest way to install ffmpeg is to use Homebrew:

brew install ffmpeg

There are some nuances to installation if you want support for certain sub-sets of functionality, but the above will at least get you started.

Basic Usage

Let’s say you downloaded a file using youtube-dl and it ended up in a format you didn’t expect:

youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s64RnXSwn-A"

The resulting file is of type .mkv; let’s say the full filename is input.mkv just to make things easier. MKV files are not a format that Apple OSes tends to like. Let’s suppose you want to convert that into something more Apple-friendly, like a .mp4. That’s simple to do:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv output.mp4

We’re using the -i parameter to specify the input file to ffmpeg, and then we’re simply specifying the output file. By virtue of the .mp4 extension, ffmpeg is smart enough to divine what to do.

Similarly, if we wanted to extract the audio from this video after we’ve already downloaded it, we could do so as such:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv output.mp3

Again, the presence of .mp3 will tell ffmpeg all it needs to know.

Trimming

If you actually watch the video, there’s an intro section and an outro section that we really don’t need. The intro ends at 46 seconds. We can instruct ffmpeg to start the output at that point:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -ss 00:00:46 output.mp3

Here, we’re using the oddly-named -ss parameter to set the hours:minutes:seconds into the input we wish to seek before we start “recording”, so to speak.

However, we haven’t gotten rid of our outro yet, which lasts for the last six seconds of the video. We can handle that using the -to option, which sets when to stop processing the input file, in the time system of the input file. Since output.mp3 is 4:34 seconds, then we need to subtract 6 from that, to land on 00:04:28:

ffmpeg -i output.mp3 -to 00:04:28 trimmed.mp3

What if we wanted to do both at once? We can use the -to parameter to set the end point (again, in terms of the input), in addition to the -ss to set the start time. Note, though, we’re using the original file as the input again. Thus, we have to change the end point for the -to since we’re starting from the full file, not the one with the intro clipped. Finally, we land on this “compound” command:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -ss 00:00:46 -to 00:05:13 trimed.mp3

In one shot, we’ve:

• Stripped the audio
• Transcoded the video
• Trimmed the beginning
• Trimmed the end

Pretty cool stuff, and pretty easy, once you learn to speak ffmpeg.

Cropping

What if you download a different file, but it has bars on the top/bottom or left/right?

youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTiiDQ03eSQ"

In this case, we’d like to remove the small black bars on the left and right sides of the video. We know we need to take off about 10 pixels total; 5 on both the left and right sides. We can do so by using a video filter:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=in_w-10:in_h" cropped.mp4

The crop parameter to the -vf (video filter) parameter indicates what the resolution of the width and then height of the output video should be. We use the in_w and in_h macros to indicate the source width and height; then we subtract 10 from the width.

Codecs

Continuing with the above example, we can make this ever-so-slightly faster. We know that we want the final file to be in the same format—.mp4—as the source was. Since we’re not doing any sort of modifications to the audio, we can tell ffmpeg to copy the audio codec:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=in_w-10" -acodec copy cropped.mp4

Since the audio is far easier to process than the video, this isn’t the best example, as the time savings are marginal. However, in some cases, you may be able to get away with copying the video codec using -vcodec copy. In those cases, that is a big time savings.

It’s beyond the scope of this article, but a nice way to figure out if you can leverage -vcodec copy is to run a command with no output:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4

That will tell you what the video and audio streams are:

Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 640x480 [SAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 819 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc (default)
Stream #0:1(und): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 125 kb/s (default)

In our case, we know that the video is h264, which means that we can use -vcodec copy is possible if we’re converting to .mp4.

Variable Bit Rates

Related to codecs, when left to its own devices, ffmpeg will encode mp3s at a constant 128kbps. That’s sufficient, but I prefer to use a variable bit rate. To do so, we use a less intuitive incantation:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 2 output.mp3

This is… completely bonkers. Ridiculous incantations like these—if not the ones that preceded it—are why ffmpeg gets a bad name. However, the sheer versatility of ffmpeg makes it an indispensible tool that I can’t imagine living without.

I’ve set up a folder in the Apple Notes app with a series of “recipes” for ffmpeg. As I find a new task I want to accomplish, I determine what the recipe is, and then write it down as a new note in that folder. You may find the same tactic is useful for you. Regardless, most of that “recipe book” has been recreated above.

I know the command line is scary, but ffmpeg is worth getting over it. Everything you do in ffmpeg is non-destructive, so the only harm in playing around is wasting time and listening to your computer’s fans scream. At first I never did anything more than transcoding using ffmpeg, but over time, I’ve gotten to be pretty confident with it.