you need to learn FFmpeg RIGHT NOW!!

0:00 Do you ever battle with finding the right tool to create a GIF, compress a huge video file, or resize an image? How about capturing your screen, running a live stream session, or audio ripping from a video you found? You probably had a name attached to each need I just mentioned. What if I told you the ultimate tool for all of these is likely already on your machine working silently under the hood in the apps you use every day. It's called FFmpeg, and it's the engine that powers everything from YouTube to Netflix. It recently rose to fame again with an unintended Twitter storm that ended in Theo contributing $5,000 to the project, which got me thinking. People think of FFmpeg as a silent library rather than something they can pretty much do anything with. I mean, FFmpeg is just this incredible like what would you call a library system? Not only is open source and completely free, it's probably the safest and highest quality

0:46 option out there. Everything else is mostly an FFmpeg wrapper. Every single application OBS probably fmp underneath the hood. all the prof everything ffmpeg underneath the hood. But it has one huge problem. It's overwhelming and like other familiar open source projects, it gives the user so much power eventually facing them with the paradox of choice and endless amount of switches to config. I I think ffmpeg like they have all these sort of parameters that you can add on the command line. It's like one of those cryptic languages that only very few wizards understand. I'm here to say that FFmpeg isn't this impossible tool for genius dark basement low-level engineers. And the truth is, you don't need to be an expert to bend video, images, or audio to your will. You just need to know the right secrets and how to put them to use. And yes, every once in a while,

1:32 use a rubber. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do everything with FFmpeg, but also how to add a touch that makes using it smooth. Well, like coconut oil. We'll go from FFmpeg's surprising history to the simple copypaste commands that will completely change how you work with media forever. FFmpeg is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day and does not get the love it deserves. I just love it. I just think they're the best. Let's get started. FFmpeg's name is basically fastforward Meg. Remember Meg? I mean the first version way back then. Who here remembers the early 2000s internet? that wild west of websites where dancing babies and rotating word art gifts were at the height of cool and every video you wanted to watch required a specific often terrible player to be downloaded. It was a mess. But out of that chaos,

2:18 a legendary programmer, the same genius who later gave us Chem, the virtualization tool many of you container users run daily, started a secret side project. He was building a key that could unlock every media format. Little did anyone know this tool FFmpeg was quietly becoming the hidden backbone of the entire internet's video. The logo represents a zigzag scan pattern that shows how meg codecs handle entropy encoding a lossless data compression. And if me saying that brings up this memory, then we're in good company. Doubled it. I'm Piper, ladies and gentlemen. Let's hear it for them. Okay, a nice trip down memory lane, but how do you use it? FFmpeg is a group of libraries for developers, but we're here for the CLI. So, let's start simple but essential. I have this cut from a previous video. I still remember the day, the moment. Yeah, fancy. Most commands require an

3:06 input introduced by hyphen i and then a file. When a video involved, you'll often have vf for video filter followed by what you're looking for. We're shortening this video to 10 frames per second. 320 pixels is our width and minus1 tells ffmpeg to calculate the height keeping the ratio intact. Lancos is a highquality algo for resizing especially when downscaling. C colon V stands for codec for video which in our case is GIF. Now you'll see the use of many algorithm names in different processes. Don't worry about remembering all of them. We'll talk about that. Okay, it runs lots of output in the logs including useful data. Let's just jump straight to what we made a beautiful GIF that's way way too small. Let's fix that. Now while FFmpeg is hard to remember configuration of once you have that oneliner changing is easy. Oh, and if you're not using vi

3:56 mode in the terminal, that's exactly why you want to start. 320, changes to 920, let it run again, uh, 1.8 megabytes of a nicely sized GIF, and job done. Do you have any idea just how many times I looked for online gift creators where I can upload a small video, wait, watch ads, run shady client code injected into my browser just to get this. I'm too embarrassed to say. Since we now have a form of an image, let's talk about images. For this trick, I'm going to use this thumbnail for a neim debugging video. A fairly large image of 3 megabytes. To shrink it, you can open a number of tools or online utilities, but ffmpeg can easily handle images. I for input takes the file name. Then the video filter, which will hold one pair of scale, and we'll fix that to 800 600. Lastly,

4:44 the output file and wham, 54 kilobytes, which are actually kabytes to be correct, but that's not the time for that. Let's see what we got. A lovely distorted image. Mission accomplished. Well, you could use the trick from earlier. Just add minus one to the tool to do the calculation. And there we have a nicely shrunk image. Perfect aspect ratio of 51 kilobytes. Job's done. Perfectly compressed media is only half the battle for a fast website. The other half is lightning fast delivery. That's where having a premium manage host like today's sponsor, Kinsta, makes all the difference. As a business owner, your focus should be on growth, not on whether your website is about to crash. If you're constantly worried about slow speeds, security threats, or getting stuck with a support chatbot, it's time for a change. This is Kinsta. They provide premium manage hosting

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6:18 to claim your offer and let your hosting just work. And now back to the video. There comes a time that you want to separate audio from video. We used to call it audio ripping back in the happy 2000s when we wanted the MTV tracks music only. Well, let's take the glamorous clip from earlier. This time with a VN flag, which the doc suggests stands for video no or no video, meaning audio. Then a codec of MP3. This is actually old syntax, but you'll see it a lot, right? So, output.mpp3 is ready to play. How about VC for the job? And there we have the beautifully ripped MP3 audio track. I still remember the day, the moment. Okay, GIFs and imageing is easy, right? Let's compress video, shall we? That's one of the main selling points of FFmpeg after all. And I understand compression,

7:05 which is another super fascinating technical uh set of problems that I don't know. I just FFmpeg just fills me with joy. Same input, this time a video codec by the name of Libx264, a well-known, widely used compression standard that's both efficient and high quality. CRF here is a rate factor. Not a straightforward term, but basically balances quality and file size. It goes from 0 to 63, where zero is higher quality and larger files, and a higher index means the opposite. However, 23 is a common default with good balance, so you'd normally see people and other software just use that. It takes about three whole seconds and the video is out. A quick look shows 3.3 megabytes out of the previous 15.2. Is it any good though? Well, not too bad if you ask me. Not bad at all. So,

7:51 you're probably thinking, am I going to have to remember all of these numbers just mentioned? Well, you don't have to. And if you're really against scripting and automation, here's an open source exactly for that. Handbreak offers much friendlier experience with its easy to use interface. It comes with readymade presets for devices and platforms. you can quickly get great results without diving deep into technical flax. It's perfect for everyday users who want simple, highquality video compression. Although, I must point out that while Handbreak uses codecs like we've seen earlier, it does not use FFmpeg or its libraries under the hood. Here's another extremely useful feature you probably didn't know about FFmpeg. It's a device capture. What does that mean? It can capture your video cams, microphones, both together, but also, and far, far more importantly, your screens. Yes, ffmpeg is a screen capture utility. This is how you list devices

8:42 for AV foundation format which is Mac specific. Windows users would have the show there for the direct show media format while Linux users can use one of the few like like V412 for video or also. So there's my list of both video and audio devices from screens through my iPhone that's waiting on my desk to my DSLR cam or meeting webcam on top. I can grab any of them and what they see or hear right from FFmpeg. Remember Zuckerberg was taping both his Max Face Cam and his microphone. Well, look how easy it is to script something that captures everything at once. I think he was worried for a good reason. Let's start with the screen capture. 7 is my main screen. So, let's get it into the list of flags here, which by now you probably know most of. So, let's just let things run. Time to move things on the screen to see how smooth it comes out. I'll drag the

9:29 finder around, stop recording with Ctrl + C, and let it gracefully shut down. This is what came out. Here's the window moving around. Not too bad for a 22 megabytes file. One thing that is missing here is the cursor. Want it in. There's a flag for that. Capture cursor. Run again. This time with a dragged window while it's playing a GIF. Let's see how it went. And there it is, even playing the GIF from the start. Now, here's the fun part. Capturing live devices. Let's go with five listed as my iPhone camera, which is immediately turned on and telling me the Mac has control. Let's pick it up and see whether FFmpeg actually gets input from it. Open the video and what do you know? Hello, that's my screen. There's the camera and a bunch of cables. Mind you, I did use 60 frames per second here like a crazy person, which explains the shakiness of what you're seeing. Nevertheless,

10:15 it works. This brings up malicious ideas to mind, but let's leave this aside. about that shakiness. FFmpeg has a solution for that as well. It's literally called a shakiness index and accuracy added to it. I didn't have a lot of success with this specifically, but I'd be very keen to hear from others who did. Just before automating things, FFmpeg can even burn watermarks on media for you. Don't believe it? Look at that. Video filter with draw text and the text itself to add. This can also take a font color and size and even a canvas coordinates. Let it run. It's done. And there you have it. burnt on the top left hand side corner should you ever need that kind of mark burnt on media you publish. Okay, how about we start automating? Even after sharing all these flags and covering what each means, there's no way I'll remember it all in the second I need a GIF

11:03 for shrinking an image. So, while there are many ways to script commands, here's my choice. A twin, while serving as my command history manager, has also a scripting system that's especially relevant here because it's easily tweaked. A twins scripts new make gif will be the example I pick here to create gifs on the fly. If we ever need changes beyond what's configured at twins scripts edit make gif will load it into the configured editor for changes. I made an entire video on a twin scripts. I'll link it up here. But for now let's create a gif automation. The oneliner takes its place here. But configured parameters will live between double curly bracket pairs making them configurable interactively. I'll do that with my input full file and then the output file name. Obviously, I can change the scale, FPS, etc. But for now, this will do. At scripts, run make GIF,

11:49 which I, by the way, mapped to ASR locally, asks for values backwards, starting with the output file name, then the input file, which I can't remember. So, T-Max to the rescue. And there it is. And there's our new GIF created from automation. Now that you've wrapped your head around FFmpeg, you're ready to put things in use. But like we mentioned, it can be quite a lot taking it all in the flags, the switches, and then configs. I mentioned a twin scripts while presenting my choice for automating FFmpeg. But you won't only getting the scripts. A twin is an entire history manager with data persistency, fuzzy finding, and a powerful sync system that I can't work without. Check it in the video up here and let me know in the comments what you think. Don't forget to check out Kinsta for a faster, more secure WordPress hosting. Check out the QR

12:35 on screen or the link in the description. Thank you for watching and I'll see you on the next