separate, simplified graphical user interface (GUI) frontend applications exist for FFmpeg, but otherwise the tools from your installation are accessed only by typing commands into the text-only command line which require you to open up a terminal shell window, in Ubuntu the standard terminal client is Bash, in Windows it’s Command Prompt. Many other tools use FFmpeg as a backend operator to accomplish their own media tasks. Additional capabilities not covered in this video conversion tutorial are converting audio formats, merging separate video and audio into a single multimedia file, concatenating image frame sequences into videos, gif conversions, trimming or appending media files, applying adjustments, and recording input streams. About FFmpegįFmpeg is an incredibly powerful, cross-platform, free, and open-source software tool for handling video, audio, and multimedia. mov video such as might find in a television Adobe Premiere workflow, a codec encoding that, outside of FFmpeg, is supported only in Adobe Media Encoder for Mac specifically. mp4 video to a more obscure Apple ProRes 422 codec. The example will expand upon a simple conversion to a specific conversion from an h.264 codec.

While FFmpeg is crossplatform, the demonstration however will only cover Windows and Linux, this writer is using Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 with administrator/superuser access and will refer to the operating systems as either Windows or Ubuntu for the remainder of the tutorial. The scope of this tutorial is to instruct the reader to be able to install FFmpeg on one’s desktop computer, and to introduce the navigation and use of its command line tool to convert a video file to another video format.

Ffmpeg mp4 to prores