FFmpeg Cheatsheet

FFmpeg is a video converter. It can be used as a swiss army knife to operate on video files.

• Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install ffmpeg

• To get information about a video file:

$ ffmpeg -i foobar.mp4

The info that is printed includes the video and audio streams. For each stream, the codec used, the resolution and bitrate is also available.

• To reduce the file size of a video file, provide a smaller bitrate. For example, I had a huge video file whose bitrate was 24000 kb/s. I reduced its size by using a 1000 kb/s bitrate:

$ ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -b:v 1000000 out.mp4

Tried with: FFmpeg 3.4.6 and Ubuntu 18.04