A Selection of FFmpeg Invocations That Have Proven Handy in Various Situations

In case you’re not aware: FFmpeg is a command-line tool that provides powerful and robust video manipulation, conversion, and streaming functionality. Since that’s a complex domain – there’s myriads of video and audio formats which may or may not intermingle within various kinds of containers, and countless operations that one might wish to perform on any of all of these – FFmpeg’s command-line interface is equally¹ complex.

As a result, many casual FFmpeg users maintain a list of frequently-used or tricky-to-replicate invocations of the tool in a text file of some kind.

You can find mine on GitHub – over there, not here in this blog post, because I find myself updating it with new bits and bobs somewhat frequently. Among other operations, my koraktor² covers stabilizing a video using FFmpeg’s vidstabdetect and vidstabtransform tooling, vertically and horizontally stacking videos, extracting all frames of a video into separate image files for later analysis, removing blemishes from videos, and transcoding M4A audio to MP3.

Perhaps one of these will come in handy for you!