Tag: ffmpeg

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 *.avi; 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.

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