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
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery topLink Plugin

    Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...

  • By
    CSS pointer-events

    The responsibilities taken on by CSS seems to be increasingly blurring with JavaScript. Consider the -webkit-touch-callout CSS property, which prevents iOS's link dialog menu when you tap and hold a clickable element. The pointer-events property is even more JavaScript-like, preventing: click actions from doing...

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!