

Filters sit between the input and the output and make some change to the media flowing through them. filter_complex can be used to combine many filters together. Resize the video ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -filter_complex scale=720:480 output.mp4 map 0:v selects the video streams from the first input (we have only one input file here anyway, marked by 0), while 0:a means the audio streams. Take only video or audio ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -map 0:v output.mp4 Here, we specify the video and audio codecs with -vcodec and -acodec. It is common to use FFmpeg to transcode from one codec to another. Codec conversion ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -vcodec libx264 -acodec flac output.mkv In addition to these two, FFmpeg supports many other popular multimedia file formats, including MXF, AVI, WAV, M4A, JPG, PNG etc. y denotes that we want to overwrite output.mp4 if it already exists.

In this simplest example, FFmpeg produces MP4 output from MKV input. Format conversion ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv output.mp4
