FFmpeg

It’s always good to review which articles readers found valuable over the past year to help focus on producing similar content in the future. By publishing the top ten, hopefully, those reading this article will see some articles they might find useful. So, without further ado, here were the top ten articles from the Streaming Learning Center blog in 2019. …

Author’s note: This is a very simple automation technique for FFmpeg beginners. I’m sure there are much more efficient ways to script this project, but this represents my baby steps in FFmpeg automation. I recently started a consulting project that involved encoding multiple files to multiple CRF values to create rate-distortion curves and BD-Rate computations. I’m testing three codecs with …

This blog identifies six incredibly useful FFmpeg commands for transmuxing, extracting audio/video, converting to YUV/Y4M, and scaling to different resolutions. All commands are included in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an …

So, the object of the exercise is a single FFmpeg script that encodes your files and creates the necessary master and media playlists. I took an initial stab here, but wound up with a script, “as ugly as someone else’s baby, particularly the need to duplicate the input file four times for the four streams.” Again through the hard work …

Reviewer Ian Kennedy recently reviewed Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg on Amazon, and he hit the nail on the head in his five-star review, saying: Who this book is for: 1) The decision maker who may be skeptical about using FFmpeg in a production environment compared to a turn-key commercial solution. 2) The video-adjacent engineer who has been asked …

So, there I was downloading videos from YouTube to include in a PowerPoint for a training course I was producing. Unfortunately, my download tool, wondershare’s excellent video converter, downloaded separate audio and video streams, the video in an MP4 wrapper and the audio as an MP3 file. So I had to mux the two to input them into PowerPoint. A …

All codecs and encoding tools have a configuration option that controls the quality/encoding time tradeoff. With x264 (and x265) the preset controls that tradeoff. When choosing a preset you should consider 3 criteria: Overall quality – the overall quality produced by that preset Low frame quality – the quality of the lowest frame produced by that preset, which indicates the …

Announcing a new online course entitled, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals. The course contains over four hours of video instruction and costs $99.95. The course teaches you how to choose, compute, and interpret video quality metrics like VMAF, SSIMPLUS, PSNR, and SSIM. Here are some of the key items you will learn. The pros and …

Derrick Freeman is a luminary in the Streaming Video world, an expert on Wowza Streaming Engine and Telestream Wirecast (among other products) who has consulted with and instructed dozens of companies, universities, and other organizations. When Derrick needed to learn how to use FFmpeg, he purchased a copy of my book, Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes …