I absolutely love ffmpeg, but for the life of me I cannot understand how its pipeline system works. Each time I need to use it, I attempt to construct the command myself, but end up giving up and consulting StackOverflow. Amazingly, someone has usually done the exact thing I need to do and posted their command line to StackOverflow, so I'm never out of luck! How do I actually start understanding how ffmpeg works? I w…
Use ChatGPT, prompt: ffmpeg pipeline capture webcam to mp4 ChatGPT: >>> ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 30 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 28 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4 Here's a brief explanation of what each part of the command does: - `f v4l2`: specifies that the input device is a V4L2 (Video for Linux 2) device, which is typically what webcams use. - `framerate 30`: sets the framer…
pix_fmt: pixel format. 99% videos use this format, and it has best compatibility. FFMPEG will try to keep the original format when do transcoding, so in most of time you don't need to specify. However, in this very case, since the input is from a webcam, the chance it uses some weird format is high. And you don't want to keep that in your final result. So it's good to specify it out here.
My 2c: ChatGPT is great, but I recommend to read the comments it gives about each parameter, try to understand their purposes, and adjust accordingly if needed.
Also having a rough idea about how FFMPEG pipeline works (mainly the order of input, output and their associated switches in arguments) helps a lot.
Video process is a very complex thing and lots of time it relies on experience. Just be prepared sometimes your "typically works" command would break.