Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Combine Audio and Video with ffmpeg

By  on  

We have audio.  We have video.  We appreciate each of those media on their own but you can create an awesome work of art if you combine the two.  After all, how could you watch a sports highlight video without setting the visuals to some obscure techno track?  Blasphemy.

My favorite A/V utility, ffmpeg, allows you to merge an audio file and a video file into one brilliant piece of art:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.m4a -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

You can even use an animated GIF for the video piece:

ffmpeg -i video.gif -i audio.m4a -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

Banter aside, there are many good cases for combining an audio track with a video track, many examples being seen on YouTube.  Happy media creation!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

    I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...

  • By
    CSS Counters

    Counters.  They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with;  a feature then, the butt of web jokes now.  CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...

Discussion

  1. Antoni

    There is a Firefox extension for this if anybody prefers UI over command line, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-converter-and-muxer

  2. Masoud Alimadadi

    If you don’t want to re-encode audio and video, you can use following command:

    ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.m4a -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

    It will execute a lot faster.

    • David Walsh

      Updated! Thank you!

    • Bumpledink Scrotleworth

      You can specify to copy both at once like this:

      ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.m4a -c copy output.mp4
    • Jabir

      This works like charm and looks few flags shorter too.

  3. Zak Kahn

    Hi David,

    Nice article. Would these same commands work efficiently on android too?

    We have a mute video to which we hope to add audio recorded from phone.

    Any guidance would be great.

  4. JC

    Can’t find ffmpeg in a zip file. Any other similar tool that opens in Windows?

  5. Kevin

    I’m not a programmer so I’m sort of confused and frustrated at what I’m looking at. I have no idea how to use this lol

  6. howard Johnson

    Here is an example batch file that you can drag the two files onto to do the joining, delete the two files and rename to the original. (drag by the mp4 file)

    @echo off 
"C:\Program Files (x86)\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -i %1 -i %2 -c:v copy -c:a copy d:\folder\output.mp4
del %1
del %2
copy d:\folder\output.mp4 %1
del d:\folder\output.mp4 
pause

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