What I love even more about ffmpeg is that it can be used on it’s own to accomplish many processing tasks in a very simple manner (with one or two commands). A number of Linux video editors use ffmpeg underneath the GUI. It is a framework with a multitude of features and, because of it’s open source license, it is the base for many widespread apps such as VLC, YouTube, iTunes and many more. It also demonstrates some useful ffmpeg commands for practical usage.įfmpeg is a CLI (command line based) utility for processing media files.

In the above example, the option “-y” passed initially is a global option, but the option “-s vga” passed before the output file name is an output specific option.Brief: This detailed guide shows how to install ffmpeg in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. So now that we have seen how a generic ffmpeg command looks like, let us take a look at how it is used using an example: So as you can see, we can pass certain options that are applicable to all or specific inputs and outputs. outputx_options: This will affect the specific output x.inputx_options: But this will affect the specific input x.global_options: So this option set will affect all inputs and outputs.

Here is how a generic ffmpeg command syntax looks like: ffmpeg global_options input1_options -i input1 input2_options -i input2.output1_options output1 output2_options output2īut do not worry for looking that complex, as we can easily understand what it does by breaking it down to simpler parts. So as a result it’s generic syntactical structure will also look quite complex at the first glance. HTTP or RTSP based multimedia streaming serverįFmpeg is a command line tool that comes with a highly complex set of options available to pass as both input and output parameters. So, this FFmpeg library is generally made up of these command line tools and libraries. So in general, we can say that FFmpeg is an efficient media file processing tool that is also open source! What does FFmpeg stands for?įFmpeg stands for Fast Forward Moving Pictures Expert Group.īut generally when we talk about FFmpeg, we talk about a library of tools that goes along with FFmpeg tool in video or audio file processing.

Ffmpeg command line samples