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
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Link Nudging Using Dojo

    In the past we've tinkered with link nudging with MooTools and link nudging with jQuery. In an effort to familiarize myself with other JavaScript frameworks, we're going to try to duplicate that effect with another awesome framework: Dojo. The JavaScript: Attempt...

  • By
    Using jQuery and MooTools Together

    There's yet another reason to master more than one JavaScript library: you can use some of them together! Since MooTools is prototype-based and jQuery is not, jQuery and MooTools may be used together on the same page. The XHTML and JavaScript jQuery is namespaced so the...

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!