Create a Waveform Image with ffmpeg

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5 download Attribute

    I tend to get caught up on the JavaScript side of the HTML5 revolution, and can you blame me?  HTML5 gives us awesome "big" stuff like WebSockets, Web Workers, History, Storage and little helpers like the Element classList collection.  There are, however, smaller features in...

  • By
    9 Incredible CodePen Demos

    CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages.   The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do.  Thanks to CSS...

Discussion

  1. Martijn Frazer

    How do you get a transparent background?

  2. Juribiyan

    Is it possible to build waveform image using offlineAudioContext? Seems like the exact tool for the job.

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