Convert webm to mp4

By  on  

There's an upcoming Mozilla trip to Hawaii on the cards and, in trying to be a good family man, I'm bringing my wife and two young sons.  Glutton for punishment?  Probably.  Anyways, I've been feverishly downloading cartoons from YouTube using youtube-dl to put onto our new iPad to keep my oldest son occupied during the long flight.

It seems as though YouTube preserves the original video format, since sometimes youtube-dl provides a webm and other times a mp4.  Since mp3s are iOS' best friend, I've needed to convert the webm files to mp4.  The following ffmpeg command will make that happen:

ffmpeg -i "Spider-Man.webm" -qscale 0 "Spider-Man.mp4"

The qscale 0 directive instructs ffmpeg not to adjust quality of the video during conversion.  And with this conversion I can now properly transfer the videos onto my iPad.

Check out my media tutorials for more magic when it comes to video, audio, and images.  You're sure to learn a few tricks along the way.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Skype-Style Buttons Using MooTools

    A few weeks back, jQuery expert Janko Jovanovic dropped a sweet tutorial showing you how to create a Skype-like button using jQuery. I was impressed by Janko's article so I decided to port the effect to MooTools. The XHTML This is the exact code provided by...

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

Discussion

  1. Raph

    Hello,

    Have a look at this : https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/firefox-addon

    This Grease adds a “convert” video to Youtube. Everything is processed on their server and it’s pretty fast !

  2. What about using the --list-formats argument with youtube-dl and download the MP4 that suits your needs?

  3. Jason Watkins

    Suggested code doesn’t work (10/22/17), Ubuntu 16.04.3 amd64

    “The encoder ‘aac’ is experimental but experimental codecs are not enabled, add ‘-strict -2’ if you want to use it.”

  4. It now says “Please use -q:a or -q:v, -qscale is ambiguous”.
    I guess -q:v 0 would be the new substitute.

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