Convert other video to FLV
$ ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320×240 video

Download YouTube videos as .flv and convert them to .3gp for your mobile phone.
$ ffmpeg -i file.flv -r 15 -b 128k -s qcif -acodec amr_nb -ar 8000 -ac 1 -ab 13 -f 3gp -y out.3gp

Extract audio and video from a file
$ ffmpeg -i source_movie.flv -vcodec mpeg2video target_video.m2v -acodec copy target_audio.mp3

Convert bunch off oggs to mp3
$ for x in *.ogg; do ffmpeg -i “$x” “`basename “$x” .ogg`.mp3″

AAC conversion
$ ffmpeg -i source.mp3 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k dest.aac
iPod / iPhone
$ ffmpeg -i input -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -flags +4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320×180 -title X output.mp4
convert-almost-any-image-into-a-video
$ ffmpeg -loop_input -f image2 -r 30000/1001 -t $seconds -i frame/$num.ppm -y frame/%02d.mpeg 2>/dev/null

Record MP3 audio via ALSA using ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i hw:1,0 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 96k output.mp3

Convert files to xvid

$ mencoder “$1″ -ofps 23.976 -ovc lavc -oac copy -o “$1″.avi

Covert wmv to avi
$ mencoder “/path/to/file.wmv” -ofps 23.976 -ovc lavc -oac copy -o “/path/to/file.avi”
Merge video files together using mencoder (part of mplayer)
$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy part1.avi part2.avi part3.avi -o full_movie.avi
Encode a file to MPEG4 format
$ mencoder video.avi lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800 newvideo.avi

Convert mp3/wav file to asterisk ulaw for music on hold (moh)
$ sox -v 0.125 -V <mp3.mp3> -t au -r 8000 -U -b -c 1 <ulaw.ulaw> resample -ql

Most ring tones in the market are of mp3 quality(true tone) but it is not easy to download a full track mp3 song on the mobile phone yet, The technology is getting better but it is still very much unstable. An alternative to the mp3 download is to use amr encoding which offers good quality at a small file size, It is not cd quality but it is still decent for the mobile phone. You can offer this as alternative download option to your already mp3 or wma ring tone formats.

With amr you can lower the file size e.g. 3 mega bytes full track(mp3) to 500 kilo bytes full track (amr). The only thing you might have to be careful about would be to check if the particular mobile phone does support amr format first before giving it the file because this can cause problems for you with users complaining about downloads not working. If you do not know how to perform checks on the phone – I would suggest you read my other previous post about achieving this feature – detecting mobile devices on your website .

Lets start converting.
Please Note: This post assumes you have Ffmpeg installed and configured on your machine,if you do not know what I mean please read the Ffmpeg section on the site.

/user/bin/ffmpeg -y -i ring.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 12.2k -ar 8000 -f amr -acodec libamr_nb ring.amr

That is all it takes to get the amr conversion working, you might want to play around with these options -ac 1 -ab 12.2k -ar 8000
until you find the right quality and size for you. Please read about the amr options available for use with Ffmpeg and what values can be or cannot be changed.

That’s it folks, I will try to cover the DRM section next time for those who do not know how to use it.

The code that did the trick:

ffmpeg -y -i myfile.mp3 -f flv -acodec libmp3 -ab 64 -ac 1 myfile.flv

This is useful if you are running a music site of some sort where you want to make sure that users can listen to the site music files online regard less of what operating system they are running.

When I run my ffmpeg without any parameters this is what I get.

FFmpeg version SVN-r9833, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-shared –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-liba52 –enable-libamr-nb –enable-libamr-wb –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –enable-libx264 –enable-libxvid –disable-mmx –enable-libtheora

Which means I have both versions of amr installed. For the sake of demonstration I a m going to use libamr_wb which is what I need to create true tones from mp3, Just remember you can use other formats besides amr to create ring tones.

ffmpeg -y -i myaudio.mp3 -ab 18.25k -ar 16000 -acodec libamr_wb -ac 1 mynewaudio.amr 2>&1

Be careful on which libamr you decide to use because they accept sampling rates which are very different, If you upload this to your phone it should play. The One nice thing about using amr is that you can cut down on the mp3 file size by more than 200% e.g. take a mp3 song which is 2.5mb in size and you convert that with the settings given above, you will have an amr file which is roughly at 500kb in size and it is still a full length song but just the quality is not as good as mp3. For best results try to play around with bit rate(-ab) variables.

Please note that some cellphones don’t support amr, so you will still have to try out other formats for them.

• AMR and 3gp [http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/amr]
• X264 [http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html]
• Xvid [http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.43.0.html]
• FAAC and FAAD2 [http://faac.sourceforge.net/oldsite/index.php]
• Libmp4v2 [http://resare.com/libmp4v2/]
• Libogg , Libvorbis and Libtheora [http://xiph.org/downloads/]
• Mplayer + Mencoder [svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer]
• FFMPEG [svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg]
• Lame [http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php]
• Flv tools [http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz]

After you have decided which ones you gonna install you can now start downloading and compiling them, just decide on your installation if you gonna install them with default parameters e.g. ./configure or with a directory e.g ./configure –prefix=$HOME.

Here are two tutorials which talk about the same thing but do help with the installations.

installing ffmpeg – the easy way

FFmpeg, FFmpeg-PHP, Lame, Libogg, Libvorbis, FLVtool2, Mplayer, Mencoder, AMR Installation

the both look very similar in approach but they both help.

when installing my codecs I prefixed them to their own directories e.g ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/lame which gave me a hard time when compiling ffmpeg to support them. After going through enough forums and maillists I finally got it to it to compile as follows,

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/ffmpeg –disable-mmx –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-liba52 –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/liba52dec/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/liba52dec/include/ –enable-libmp3lame –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/lame/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/lame/include/ –enable-libamr-nb –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/amrnb/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/amrnb/include/ –enable-libamr-wb –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/amrwb/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/amrwb/include/ –enable-libfaac –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/faac/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/faac/include/ –enable-libfaad –enable-libx264 –enable-libxvid –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/xvidcore/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/xvidcore/include/ –enable-libogg –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libogg/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libogg/include/ –enable-libvorbis –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libvorbis/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libvorbis/include/ –enable-libtheora –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libtheora/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libtheora/include/

after you are done you ffmpeg should now work fine, but if it complains about missing libraries you can append them to /etc/ld.so.conf file e.g echo “/usr/local/xvidcore/lib/” >> /etc/ld.so.conf and then do an ldconfig. That should get you converting videos and audio files with ffmpeg.

when I run ffmpeg on my server

/usr/local/ffmpeg/bin # ./ffmpeg

FFmpeg version SVN-r10131, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –prefix=/usr/local/ffmpeg –disable-mmx –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-liba52 –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/liba52dec/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/liba52dec/include/ –enable-libmp3lame –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/lame/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/lame/include/ –enable-libamr-nb –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/amrnb/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/amrnb/include/ –enable-libamr-wb –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/amrwb/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/amrwb/include/ –enable-libfaac –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/faac/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/faac/include/ –enable-libfaad –enable-libx264 –enable-libxvid –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/xvidcore/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/xvidcore/include/ –enable-libogg –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libogg/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libogg/include/ –enable-libvorbis –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libvorbis/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libvorbis/include/ –enable-libtheora –extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/libtheora/lib/ –extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/libtheora/include/
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.41.0
libavformat version: 51.12.2
built on Aug 21 2007 15:30:46, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]… {[outfile options] outfile}…
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder

I hope this help, If you are still having problems getting ffmpeg to work on you machine atfer following all the links I provided Please let me know. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment.