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
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

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!