A FFmpeg Tutorial For Beginners

FFmpeg is a complete, cross platform command line tool capable of recording, converting and streaming digital audio and video in various formats. It can be used to do most of our multimedia tasks quickly and easily say, audio compression, audio/video format conversion, extract images from a video and a lot more. In this howto I will tell you how to do all of this stuff using FFmpeg.

I am not a professional related to any field that makes use of ffmpeg. I use it sometimes for my daily multimedia requirements. So, these articles might not reach the advanced level you may expect. I have written this tutorial by keeping in mind the needs of regular users who don't always need advanced methods. That's why I have written down the tutorials as day to day tasks that a regular user like me and you may face.

In case you want some tutorial to be added or corrected or have some tip to share about FFmpeg, do leave a reply or send us a a note through the contact form. I would love to cover most of the tasks that can be done with FFmpeg and make this tutorial a well formed FFmpeg guide for new users.

8 Comments

Alex (not verified)
March 25th, 2010 05:03 pm
Awesome tutorial !
/me (not verified)
May 27th, 2010 01:58 pm
Strike 'convert' from your multimedia vocabulary and insert 'transcode'. Now you're less unprofessional
bennet (not verified)
July 14th, 2010 11:00 am
I am a teacher who wants to interest the students into free and open software development. This is an excellent series of articles just tailor made for that job. Thank you very much.
kyle (not verified)
August 1st, 2010 05:10 pm
In your very first paragraph you said "FFmpeg is a complete, cross platform command line tool capable of recording, converting and streaming digital audio and video in various formats." Your tutorial only refers to conversion. My question is: Can you start recording from a webcam via the command line with this software? And if so, how?
August 2nd, 2010 05:32 am

Yes, the tool is capable of a lot of stuff, but I have only used it for media conversions. Since you have pointed it out, I would look forward to write about its other capabilities/features too.

Sezmeralda (not verified)
September 29th, 2010 10:53 am
Just fantastic, thank you! This tutorial is a nice, easy break down of the ffmpeg commands with clear examples. In about 5 minutes you'd shown me everything I needed to know for my first task in ffmpeg, which was to split the audio from the video in a file I had. Great stuff!
upama thakur (not verified)
March 10th, 2011 05:26 pm
Nice Article for all the beginners
snoor (not verified)
March 21st, 2011 08:50 am
helpful tutorial ^_^ I have a suggestion ...... can you add some tutorial that help us to create our program it's mean , use the ffmpeg code in our program to make special task instead of using the library only Best regard *_*

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