Trying to perform this testing, as well as the associated quality measurements, with one or more applications would have been impossibly cumbersome.īeyond encoding, FFmpeg also provides a useful range of functionality, like changing container formats without re-encoding, extracting file sections without re-encoding, and scaling files to different resolutions, all of which made my article, ' Discover the Six FFmpeg Commands You Can't Live Without,' one of the most popular articles on Streaming Media.

About FFmpegĪccording to FFmpeg's About page, 'FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created.' FFmpeg runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and a wide variety of other build environments and is incredibly useful for a broad range of activities.įor example, I learned FFmpeg to support the experimentation that went into my book, Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork From Your Streaming Video, which involved thousands of encodes to identify the optimal encoding parameters for H.264, HEVC, and VP9. Note that you can download the scripts shown in this article. Most of the new additions fall into the advanced category and won't affect what's shown in this tutorial. To celebrate and to help introduce new users to the power and ease of FFmpeg, I created this entry-level tutorial for single and two-pass encoding with FFmpeg.įor the record, many of the major changes to FFmpeg were at the application programming interface level, so if you're driving the program from the command line, you'll see little difference. Thankfully, Lorenz didn't 'break' any of the command strings that I tested from my FFmpeg book, Learn to Produce Video With FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less, or courses, so hopefully, it won't break existing command strings for other users. On January 17, 2022, FFmpeg released FFmpeg 5.0, called Lorentz.

Ffmpeg crf values