Wednesday, May 23, 2012

How-To Convert Audio/Video in Linux

Sometime we need to convert audio/video from type to another for many reasons such as reduce the size  of an email attachment, compatibility hell or others.Linux users are lucky enough to have a nice tool called ffmpeg.

ffmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and re-size video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter.

Installation is easy and straight forward since ffmpeg tool is exist in most primary distributions repository.so we can use the package manager to install it. since i am running a fedora system i am going to us YUM.

$ sudo yum install ffmpeg


The usage of ffmpeg is easy too, i will show few examples.

Example below is the simplest way, which is to pass the input file name and the output file name only.

$ ffmpeg -i mysong.wav mysong.mp3    # this will convert audio.wav to audio.mp3.

$ ffmpeg -i video.avi video.mp4    # same as the previous example.

Notice that we are providing the output file's extension too. There are many options for this tool, the most common are below.

Audio/Video

-i  input file name
-b  bitrate
-f  format ( mp3,ogg,wav,avi,mp4...etc)
-fs file size, this option will trim your video when the size limit is reached
-y  overwrite output files
-sameq covert but keep original quality

Video only

-r frame rate (fps)
-s set frame size (128x96,800x600,1920x1080...etc)


a little more advanced method were we put more options is use.

$ ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -y -b 44.1k -f ogg -fs 10M song


$ ffmpeg -i video.webm -y -b 44.1k -f avi -fs 100M -s 1920x1080 -r 60 video

see the manual for all options


$ man ffmepg

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