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you need to learn FFmpeg RIGHT NOW!! | DevOps Toolbox | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: you need to learn FFmpeg RIGHT NOW!!
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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
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,
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,
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
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
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,
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
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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,
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,
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
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
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,
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
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,
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
on screen or the link in the description. Thank you for watching and I'll see you on the next
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