HTML5 in Action

Appendix H. Encoding with FFmpeg

You can convert video between container formats and re-encode the audio and video streams within them using several different utilities. In this appendix you’ll concentrate on FFmpeg, a command-line tool. Let’s review several good reasons for using this tool:

• It’s open source and freely downloadable.^[1]

  ¹ FFmpeg is free, but you may be required to pay a licensing fee to the MPEG-LA if you use it to encode h264 video.

• It’s available for all the major client and server platforms: Windows, OS X, and Linux.
• Command-line tools lend themselves to scripting, if you have to process many videos.
• It can be called from server-side code.

Let’s also look at disadvantages:

• You may be unfamiliar with command-line ...