Linux FFMPEG – Flip Vertical Video to Horizontal

Posted on by rcragun

I was recently shooting some videos on my phone to share with someone else and accidentally flipped the phone before filming a clip. I never film vertically as I know that our playback devices are not designed to playback vertical footage. But I screwed up and got a clip that was vertical. Since I would consider sharing such a clip “bad form,” I needed a quick and easy way to flip the clip. Enter FFMPEG.

This can be done very easily with a single line of code at the console or terminal in Linux, assuming you have FFMPEG installed. Here’s the line of code:

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -vf "transpose=2" output_video.mp4

Here’s what the code does. First, it calls “ffmpeg.” Then you tell it what video to input “-i input_video.mp4.” (The “-i” tells FFMPEG that what follows is the input.) If you’re not in the same directory as the video, you can simply add that information (e.g., /home/user/input_video.mp4). Next, the “-vf “transpose=2″” tells FFMPEG to first “-vf” create a filtergraph (basically, apply a filter) which is “transpose.” The “2” indicates how much to rotate the video – 90 degrees in this case. Finally, pick a name for your file and a file extension. That’s it. That will rotate your video from vertical to horizontal.

Here’s an actual example of code that I used:

ffmpeg -i /home/ryan/Desktop/vertical.mp4 -vf "transpose=2" /home/ryan/Desktop/horizontal.mp4

Sources for this post. FFMPEG’s documentation (here and here) and this post.

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Linux – Batch Convert .wav to .flac

Posted on by rcragun

I ran into a weird issue the other day where SoundConverter, a GUI for converting audio files, was generating flac files that my audio player couldn’t see. I’m still not exactly sure what the problem was, but in trying to solve the problem, I went ahead and wrote a command to batch convert a folder of .wav (WAV) files to .flac (FLAC) files using FFMPEG. I figured I’d put it up here for me in the future and in case anyone else finds it useful.

First, navigate in a terminal/console to the folder where the audio files are you want to convert to flac. Then run the following command:

for i in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:a flac "${i%.*}.flac"; done

Breaking this code down… The first part “for i in *.wav” starts the loop by telling the computer to loop through every file in that folder. The second part tells the computer what to do (“do”) with each of those files: load the ffmpeg software and for each file “$i” convert it to flac “-c:a flac”, renaming the file with the same name as before but with the flac file extension “”${i%.*}.flac””. (See here for what these characters do.) When that is complete, the loop is done.

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Linux: Batch Convert .avi files to .mp4/.mkv

Posted on by rcragun

I’ve been trying to clean up my video library since building my latest NAS. In the process, I found a number of .avi files, which is an older file format that isn’t widely used these days. While every time a file is converted it loses some of its quality, I was willing to risk the slight quality reduction to convert the remaining few files I had to convert into more modern file formats.

I initially tried converting the files using HandBrake. But given the number I needed to convert, I decided pretty quickly that I needed a faster method for this. Enter stackoverflow.

Assuming you have all of your .avi video files in a single directory, navigate to that directory in a terminal and you can use the following single line of code to iterate through all of the .avi files and convert them to .mp4 files:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

In case you’re interested, the code is a loop. The first part starts the loop (“for i in *.avi;”), telling the computer to look for every file with the file extension .avi. The second part tells the computer what to do with every file with that extension – convert it to a .mp4 file with the same name. The last piece indicates what to do when the loop is completed – done.

Of course, this code could also be used to convert any other file format into a different format by replacing the .avi or .mp4 file extensions in the appropriate places. For instance, to convert all the .avi files to .mkv, the code would look like this:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mkv"; done

Or if you wanted to convert a bunch of .mp4 files into .mkv files, you could do this:

for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mkv"; done

BONUS:

If you have .avi files in a number of subfolders, you’ll want to use this script:

find . -exec ffmpeg -i {} {}.mp4 \;

To use it, navigate in a terminal to the top-level folder, then execute this command. It will search through all the subfolders, find all the files in those subfolders, and convert them all to .mp4 files.

Of course, if you have a mixture of file types in the folders, you’ll want a variation of this command that searches for just the files of a certain type. To do that, use this command:

find . -name *.avi -exec ffmpeg -i {} {}.mp4 \;

This command will find all the files with the extension .avi and convert them all to .mp4 files using ffmpeg.

And, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you could search for multiple file types and convert them all:

find . -name *.avi -or -name *.mkv -exec ffmpeg -i {} {}.mp4 \;

This code would find every file with the extension .avi or .mkv and convert it to .mp4 using ffmpeg.

NOTE: This command uses the default conversion settings of ffmpeg. If you want more fine-tuned conversions, you can always check the options available in converting video files using ffmpeg.

BONUS 2

If you want to specify the codec to use in converting the files, that is a little more complicated. For instance, if I want to use H265 instead of H264 as my codec, I could use the following code to convert all of my .avi files in a folder into .mkv files with H265 encoding:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k "${i%.*}.mkv"; done

The default setting in ffmpeg for audio is to pass it through. Thus, if you wanted to just convert the video to a new codec but leave the audio, you could use the following command:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast "${i%.*}.mkv"; done

This will convert the video to H265 but retain whatever audio was included with the video file (the default is to take the audio with the highest number of channels).

Additional information on the various settings for H.265 is available here. Some quick notes: the number after “-crf” is basically an indicator of quality, but is inverted. Lower numbers improve the quality; higher numbers reduce the quality. Depending on what I’m encoding, I vary this from 24 (higher quality) to 32 (lower quality). This will affect the resulting file size. If time is not a concern, you can also change the variable after “-preset.” The options are ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, and veryslow. Slower encodes will result in better quality output but it will take substantially longer to do the encode.

If you run into the problem where you are trying to do bulk conversions but the names of the videos you are converting have spaces in them, you may get the error: “find: paths must precede expression.” The solution is to put the pattern in single quotes, like this:

find . -name '*.mkv' -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast {}-new.mkv \;

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