A Guide To Video And Audio Conversion

Using FFmpeg
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.

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-bit Windows 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 named FFmpegTool
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?