Create a Waveform Image with ffmpeg
Waveform images have a variety of uses and I've started seeing waveform images overlaying at the bottom of videos. That type of feature seems useful if you want to see identify music in a video or specific spaces in a video which feature action. If you're creating an audio-centric app, you may have a dozen uses for the waveform image.
You can easily create a waveform image using the amazing ffmpeg utility with a very short command:
ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex "showwavespic=s=640x120" -frames:v 1 output.png
The image you'll get back will look similar to:

There are a variety of customizations you can create for waveform image as detailed in the ffmpeg waveform documentation. Take some time to experiment with all of the features provided by ffmpeg -- you can do amazing things with media!
![CSS @supports]()
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
![Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript]()
Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect.
The XHTML
Just some simple...
![Chris Coyier: Some Amazing Work on CodePen III]()
I'm back! David asked me to rope up some of my favorite stuff on CodePen again, which I both love doing, and wince at the thought of having to pick so few favorites. I like a ton of stuff on...
How do you get a transparent background?
Is it possible to build waveform image using
offlineAudioContext? Seems like the exact tool for the job.