Here, we passed the -c copy option which causes the original audio + video streams (with their codecs) to simply be copied. Lets say you wish to encode an AVI into a MP4 file.įfmpeg -i inputFile.avi -c copy outputFile.mp4 Encoding a Video from 1 format to another: Copy Encoding/ Stream copy – Now that you have an idea of the basics of a Video file, lets go ahead and learn how we could encode video into a different format.ġ. Examples of some popular containers are OGG (.ogg), AVI (.avi), MPEG (.mpeg), Matroska (.mkv). The container is represented by a file extension. These components would be the video itself, the audio track(or even multiple audio tracks), the subtitles if any, meta-data and so on. Container: A container, (as the word suggests) is something that contains the components of a video together.Currently, h265 and vp9 are popular video codecs with great support. The codec to be used is decided depending on factors like target file-size and target quality.

Decoding is a process that reverses the encoding process for playback. Encoding is the process where the video data is compressed/encrypted for transmission or storage.

Codec: A codec is nothing but a way/method of encoding or decoding a video.If you haven’t already installed FFmpeg, you can download and install it from here. FFmpeg has a lot of options/parameters and sometimes these can get quite convoluted, so we will go through the most common video tasks explaining in detail the options/parameters to be passed. FFmpeg is a powerful tool compatible with major Operating Systems (Linux, Mac, Windows). It can re-encode videos and join, merge or split videos at ones will.

FFmpeg can be used to encode videos into difference formats.

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