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
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    DWRequest: MooTools 1.2 AJAX Listener & Message Display

    Though MooTools 1.2 is in its second beta stage, its basic syntax and theory changes have been hashed out. The JavaScript library continues to improve and become more flexible. Fellow DZone Zone Leader Boyan Kostadinov wrote a very useful article detailing how you can add a...

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Buttons with the Dojo Toolkit

    I love that JavaScript toolkits make enhancing web pages incredibly easy. Today I'll cover an effect that I've already coded with MooTools: creating a Twitter-style animated "Sign In" button. Check out this five minute tutorial so you can take your static...

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!