Normally it will require to specify the input file and output file, but in this case, the output file can be omitted since we only need to get some basic information. FFmpeg Get Video Infoįirst, you can easily get the information of a given media file (say input.mp4) using FFmpeg. Here at VideoProc, we also prepare you a step-by-step tutorial about how to install FFmpeg.

If you are just getting started, first you'll need to download the source code or a build from the official download page, and install it on your device. So here in this post, I will introduce 31 most commonly used FFmpeg commands with examples to perform various tasks like converting media formats, trimming videos, extracting audio/video streams, etc. You will need to type commands with your keyboard to transcode multimedia files and streams. It packs many encoders and decoders, making it powerful enough to support almost all common and uncommon multimedia formats.įFmpeg comes with a learning curve especially if you are new to a command line tool. You can use sed for all kinds of find/replace style operations, and you can use xargs to control how previous stages are handled in the next stage.FFmpeg is a free and open-source command line-based tool to handle video, audio, and other multimedia files. Instead of starting with the list of files in a directory you could grab the list from inside a csv, or from a network stream. This will execute the following commands one after the other: ffmpeg -i video001.mkv mp4/video001.mp4įfmpeg -i video005.mkv mp4/video005.mp4 Conclusion We need -n 2 to tell xargs that we only want two parameters per ffmpeg execution. We use xargs here to control the parameters. Video005.mkv mp4/video005.mp4 Use FFMPEG to do the conversionįinally we get to the ffmpeg step. Here is the loop: for i in *.avi do ffmpeg -i '$i' '$' | sed 's/.mkv$/.mp4/g'

You can do this with a loop, but the real purpose of this article is to explore a combination of tools including pipe, grep, find, xargs, and sed. It presented a good opportunity to show how you can tie together a bunch of useful Linux command line tools to do the job. I had a bunch of video files that I needed to convert from mkv to mp4 so that they would work on a media player I was testing.

Ffmpeg batch convert video