Note that the streams descriptions have hard returns added for readability, your result will look different. The first command gathers information about the video: ffmpeg -i tears_of_steel_1080p.movĪnd the result will be something like this. These are some of the basic commands that I use. Once it is installed you get the ffmpeg command available. The command will install FFMPEG with the optional Open H264 support enabled.

I’ve chosen to install FFMPEG via Homebrew rather than compile it directly via XCode. While there are tools like IFFMPEG they are not as comprehensive as I’d like them to be so we need to learn at least the basic of the command line.

There are times when I dearly wish I had a GUI to do some of the work, particularly with feature-rich applications like FFMPEG but we don’t always have the chance or the choice.

It will, supposedly, provide better compression than HEVC/H265 and not be encumbered by patents to the level of H265 and H264.įor an idea of the licensing nightmare HEVC has created see this article in The Register Once support for AV1 comes to FFMPEG I will recompile it to include AV1 support.

X264 ffmpeg crf 25