Installing FFMPEG on Ubuntu 16.04

FFmpeg-tool (Fast Forward MPEG) is a free and open source video and audio converter software that comprises a collection of tools and libraries for processing multimedia content for instance video, audio, subtitles and related metadata.
The software project was inspired by MPEG standards. It’s licensed under GNU / GPL license.

Some of the libraries include:

libavcodec: Contains a myriad of encoders and decoders for video and audio streams.
libavformat: This provides a framework for demultiplexing and multiplexing video and audio streams.
libavutil: includes hashers, decompressors and facilitates multimedia programming.
libavfilter: provides a framework for Audio and Video filtering.
libavdevice: Supports several playback devices and is charged with grabbing and rendering to input and output devices.
libswresample Facilitates audio mixing and audio conversion operations
libswscale implements high definition image scaling, pixel conversion tasks and color conversion.

Some tools include:

ffmpeg is a tool for manipulating, converting and streaming multimedia content.
ffplay is a simplified multimedia player.
ffprobe This is a minimalistic tool for searching multimedia content.
ffserver This is a streaming server tool for live broadcasts.
Other tools include qt-faststart, ismindex and aviocat

apt-get update

Install FFmpeg

apt-get install ffmpeg

Once installed, run

man ffmpeg

This gives you more detailed information about FFmpeg

Finding the version of FFmpeg

 ffmpeg -version

Converting a video file to another file format

Converting mp4 to avi format

ffmpeg -i input sample1.mp4 sample1.avi

Concerting flv to MPEG

ffmpeg -i input sample1.flv sample2.mpeg

mov to mp4

ffmpeg -i sample1.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -strict -2 sample1.mp4

Converting Video to Audio

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp4 -vn -ab 320 sample2.mp3

320 is the bitrate here.

Compressing video files

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp4 -b 1000000 sample2.mp4

similarly, 1000000 is the bitrate

Compressing audio files

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp3 -ab 128 sample1.mp3

Installing FFMPEG on Ubuntu 16.04

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