Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Convert Videos (MP4, MPEG, or MOV) to WEBM

By  on  

In an effort to make the web and media more efficient, developers and corporations everywhere are investing effort in creating better file formats and delivery streams.  One of the more impressive video formats I've seen is the WEBM file format.  WEBM files are quite small but the quality is still impressive.  If you're ready to support and serve WEBM, here's how you can convert your traditional file format videos to WEBM!

You're going to use ffmpeg, as you could probably guess.  Thanks to a tip from the Theme Foundry, here's the shell command magic that will convert your video to WEBM:

ffmpeg -i trailer.mov -c:v libvpx -crf 10 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis trailer.webm

A comparison of quality is the same but the comparison in file size is fractional.

Supporting WEBM on Apache Servers

You may need to add support to your Apache server for WEBM since it's a newer format. Here's how I added WEBM support via .htaccess:

AddType video/webm webm

WEBM will be a great format moving forward and I look forward to seeing our legacy formats leave while new formats take over.  It's a true sign that the future is mobile!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

  • By
    Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

    I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Speech Recognition

    Speech recognition software is becoming more and more important; it started (for me) with Siri on iOS, then Amazon's Echo, then my new Apple TV, and so on.  Speech recognition is so useful for not just us tech superstars but for people who either want to work "hands...

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    WebM is indeed an impressive format that only needs some wider support, starting from Microsoft – but it won’t happen any time soon, I guess. Same story for WebP, that could replace png, jpeg and even animated gifs.

    • David Walsh

      Supposedly mozjpeg is better than webp too!

  2. Bhumi

    Hi,

    Is there anyway to create webm video from pptx?

  3. Bushwazi

    First time commenter, long time reader…

    I used FireFogg to generate webm videos as well: http://firefogg.org/

  4. Tonya Rose

    Awesome! I just learned how to edit webm files from this: http://www.videostudiopro.com/en/pages/webm-file/ and I wanted to convert some mp4 files to webm and practice a bit. I tried your way and it works great! Thanks for the tip!

  5. Shifflett Kristen

    Thank you for these instructions, really helpful!! I used to convert MP4 video to Webm video with Acethinker video converter, It is a cloud based software to convert videos without install any software in your device. Share it here as an alternative method.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!