FFMPEG tips and tricks

Cut a video

Below we have a command to cut a video. let we suppose that we have a video with 5 minutes, we going to call that video as vid.mp4, and we want to get a part of the video, 1:30min to 3min, so to do that we will write this:

ffmpeg -ss 00:01:30 -to 00:03:00 -i vid.mp4 -c copy output.mp4

vid.mp4 its our video that we want to cut, and output.mp4 is the name (we are free to put any name) of the video result ou output.

Cut multiples clips

Now we want to slice all the video, from the beginning to the end, so we will use this command below:

ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 -acodec copy -f segment -segment_time 180 -vcodec copy -reset_timestamps 1 -map 0 output%d.mp4

Let we suppose that vid.mp4 has 10 minutes. We can see above the number 180, its 180 seconds or in other words, 3 minutes, so we will slice the entire video in 3min each piece.

We also can notice that output%d.mp4 has a % symbol, actually is %d this allow us to add automacally the number at the file, for example: output001.mp4, output002.mp4, output003.mp4 and etc, because this command will create one or many archives.

If we want slice 1 minute we need to write in seconds, so we can convert it doing this math -> 1*60, 2 minutes: 2*60, 30 min: 3*600, 2:34min: (2*60)+34.

Transform video frames to png

To transform the video frames to image we will use this command:

ffmpeg -i inputvideo.mp4 -vf fps=30 output%d.png

In fps if we want get one frame each 1 minute, we will put fps=1/60, 30 seconds fps=1/30, 10 minutes fps=1/600 etc.