A Guide To Video And Audio

Conversion Using FFmpeg

Fahad Khan

Desktop

FFmpeg is a very powerful and great command line tool used for performing various
conversion operations on audio and video files. The good thing about this tool is that it
is absolutely free to use. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.
Not everyone knows how to use it though and for that purpose, Ive come up with this
guide on how to use FFmpeg for Windows OS. From the very first step of downloading
the program to cropping an audio file, this tutorial aims to help you cover the basics, so
that you can play around more later on.
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Downloading FFmpeg for Windows

To download the tool, click here to go to the webpage. Once youve done that locate
the download option, as shown below. The download option highlighted in green is
for 32-bit Windows OS while the other option in red is for 64-bitWindows OS.

To verify if your OS is 32-bit or 64-bit, click on the Start icon on the left side of your
desktop then type Run in search bar and in run write the command of dxdiag and press
the Enter key.
Under the heading of System Information, you can easily find the name of the OS and
the version being used (32-bit or 64-bit).

Extracting the Files

Once you have downloaded FFmpeg, youll have to extract the files from the .zip
folder. For this purpose, you should have a zip extractor installed. You can download a
free zip extractor called 7-zip from here.

After extracting the files, select all of the files, create a folder in C drive
namedFFmpegTool and paste all the files in this folder as shown below. It is important to
note that you should keep the folder name and drive the same to avoid any problems in
executing commands to perform conversions.

Starting FFmpeg
Go to Run, type cmd and press the Enter key. A command line window will appear as
shown here.

Type cd\ and press the Enter key. It should appear as below.

Now type cd FFmpegTool, this command will allow you to enter into the
FFmpegTool folder which we have created earlier (be careful with the spelling as any
spelling mistake in command will cause an error).

Type cd bin and press the Enter key to access the content in the bin folder. You should
see the following.

Finally, type ffmpeg.exe and press the Enter key. It will take 1 or 2 seconds to execute
the command and you should be able to see the result shown below.

If you see text lines written on your screen (as per the above image) then it means the tool
is working fine and ready to use.

Important Commands
Now, well go through some of the important commands for FFmpeg. Copy the video
in the bin folder on which youll perform the operations. I have copied a video
called samplevideo and will use this video throughout the remainder of this post.

1. Extracting Audio only From Video File

Once you have tested that FFmpeg is working fine then type in the following command:
ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -vn -ab 128 outputaudio.mp3

Here -vn is used to extract audio and -ab is used to save audio as 128Kbps MP3 file.
You can change the bit rate to 256Kbps or something else. Just change the value after ab. All of the output files will be stored automatically in the bin folder.

2. Extracting Video While Muting Audio

In the command written below, -an is used to remove the audio from the video file. The
command should look like so:
ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -an mutevideo.mp4

3. Resize the Video File

In the command written below, -s is used to resize the video file.The command is:
ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -s 640x480 -c:a copy resizedvideo.mp4

4. Adding Poster Image to an Audio File

You can add a poster image to your audio file easily and the output would be a video
file with an image being displayed in the front and audio in the background. This is really
handy when uploading MP3 files to video hosting and sharing sites.
You must copy the image in the bin folder. Then execute this command:
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i inputimage.jpg -i inputaudio.mp3 -c:v libx264
-c:a strict experimental -b:a 192k -shortest outputfile.mp4

5. Cut Video File into a Smaller Clip

The -ss defines the starting time stamp (here starting time is the 45th second) and t tells the total time duration for the clip. So, -t 40 means 40 second duration. The

command should like this:

ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -ss 00:00:45 -codec copy -t 40
outputclip.mp4

6. Split a Video File into Multiple Parts

Most of the hosting servers only allows for a specific size of file to be uploaded. To
overcome this issue, you can use the split command to split a large video file into
smaller parts, which is:
ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -t 00:00:59 -c copy part1.mp4 -ss
00:00:59 -codec copy part2.mp4

Here -t 00:00:59 represents a part that is created from the start of the video to the 59th
second of video. -ss 00:00:59 shows the starting time stamp for the video. It means that
the 2nd part will start from the 59th second and will continue up to the end of the original
video file.

7. Convert a Video File from One Format to Another Format

You can see all of the formats supported by FFmpeg by using the following command:
ffmpeg -formats

To convert a video file from one format to another format, the following command is
used:
ffmpeg -i yourvideoname.mp4 -c:v libx264 outputfilename.wmv

The command below is an example of when converting a .mp4 file into a .wmv file.

8. Join (merge) Video Files

FFmpeg can also join multiple video or audio files with the same codecs. Create
a .txt file including a list of all the input video files that are supposed to be merged. The
keyword file is followed by name, path and the format of the video files. Add all of the
files in the same way in the created .txt file and save this .txt file in the bin folder.

Now type the following command to join the video files:

ffmpeg -f concat -i file-list.txt -c copy outputfile.mp4

9. Cropping an Audio File

To crop part of an audio file, the following command can be utilized:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:15 -t 45 -i sampleaudio.mp3 croppedaudio.mp3

Here, -ss 00:00:15 is the staring time and -t 45 is the duration of the cropped file.

Conclusion
Weve covered downloading and installing FFmpeg as well as some of the useful
commands that you can use. You can explore the rest of the commands via the help
option of FFmpeg. Just type in ffmpeg -h in command line. This will list all the
available options and commands for these options. So why dont you try it out for
yourself?