FFMPEG - The Swiss Army Knife for Video and Streams

July 31, 2022

FFMPEG is a set of CLI softwares to manipulate videos and streams. FFMPEG comes with ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe command line tools to probe, play, convert and stream video files and camera streams.

### Play an IP Camera Stream
ffplay "rtsp://username:password@192.168.0.102:554/abcd"

### Resize VIDEO
ffmpeg -i originalVideo.mov -vf scale=1080:-1 scaledVideo.mp4

### Push IP Cam RTSP stream to a RTMP server for distribution
ffmpeg -an -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://username:password@192.168.0.102:554/abcd" -tune zerolatency -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt + -c:v copy -f flv -flvflags no_duration_filesize rtmp://123.0.0.1:1935/live/test

# Trim MP4 Meta Data
$ ffmpeg -i boring.mp4 -ss 00:00:03 -t 00:00:08 -async 1 focus.mp4
(ss: start_trim, t: duration, i: input video)

###  Convert mp4 to GIF
$ ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 10 -i xn.mp4 -vf "fps=10,scale=640:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 xn.gif

# Check MP4 Meta Data
$ ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -f ffmetadata in.txt
$ ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -map_metadata 0 -map_metadata:s:v 0:s:v -map_metadata:s:a 0:s:a -f ffmetadata in.txt

# Flip and Rotate Video 360
$ ffplay "rtsp://admin:123@19268.0.100:554/onvif1" -vf "transpose=3, transpose=2,format=yuv420p"

# Stream a MP4 Video to RTSP Server
$ ffmpeg -re -stream_loop -1 -i bodycam_08012022.mov -c copy -f rtsp rtsp://localhost:8554/mystream -b:v 2M -maxrate 2M -bufsize 1M

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