How to trim a video using FFMPEG
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Recently I came across a video that I wanted to split up into multiple files. Given my love for ffmpeg the video/audio swiss army knife, I knew there had to be a solution for cutting a video on the terminal. Luckily on AskUbuntu, Luis Alvarado provides a command snippet. This post will go into slightly more detail on the flags used in the command
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 \
-t 00:30:00 \
-i input.mp4 \
-vcodec copy \
-acodec copy \
output.mp4
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
-ss |
Position within the input file. Most file formats do not allow exact seeking, so ffmpeg will pick the closest seek point. Format is in time duration notation. |
-t |
Limits the duration of data read from the input file. Format is in time duration notation. |
-vcodec |
Format used to transcribe the video. Use copy to not transcribe to a different format. |
-acodec |
Format used to transcribe the audio. Use copy to not transcribe to a different format. |
Time duration notation follows the format <HH>:<MM>:<SS> where HH is the number of hours, MM is the number of minutes, and SS is the number of seconds.
For this command in general, the output video length would be the same time duration as specified in the -t flag.