FFmpeg Cheatsheet

FFmpeg is a great command-line tool for dealing with audio and video files. Here are some useful commands:

1. Reduce the size of a file

Try passing the file straight through ffmpeg and check if the size reduces:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp4

To reduce the size further, scale the video to half the width and height:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=iw/2:ih/2" output.mp4

2. Convert a MOV file to MP4

ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -strict -2 out.mp4

3. Create a video from an image by panning across it

If you have a landscape image, first set its height to 1600px, preserving aspect ratio (using an image editor such as IrfanView). Then run the following command to create a video which pans across the image from left to right:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i input.jpg -vf crop=1200:ih:'min((iw/10)*t,9*iw/10)':0 -t 5 out.mp4