Slice Videos with ffmpeg

By  on  

Isolating a specified portion of a video is a very common task for those who work within the media, probably using nice GUI tools to slice clips from the full video.  I'm a developer, however, and know how amazing ffmpeg is so I prefer to do my basic video slicing from command line.

Let's look at the following command and break it down:

# Creates 12 second video
./ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:05 -c copy -t 12 sliced-output.mp4

The -i obviously represents the input file, the ss represents the time to start the slicing at, and the -t represents the number of seconds from the ss to include within the slice.  I'm seeing result quality vary when it comes to -c copy; most times the quality is better with it, but on some rare occasions the quality is better without it.

If you prefer to explicitly cite the hour:minute:second mark which to cut to, use the -to option:

# Creates 2 second video
./ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:05 -c copy -to 00:00:07 sliced-output.mp4

User interfaces and apps are awesome when doing work manually but aren't always great to automate. Since ffmpeg is a command line utility, automating almost anything with video is reasonably easy if you take the time to learn the tool!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Instagram For MooTools

    If you're still rocking an iPhone and fancy taking a photo every now and then, you'd be crazy not to be using an app called Instagram.  With Instagram you take the photos just as you would with your native iPhone camera app, but Instagram...

  • By
    Making the Firefox Logo from HTML

    When each new t-shirt means staving off laundry for yet another day, swag quickly becomes the most coveted perk at any tech company. Mozilla WebDev had pretty much everything going for it: brilliant people, interesting problems, awesome office. Everything except a t-shirt. That had to change. The basic...

Discussion

  1. dragos

    Love your articles! :) Everything’s explained briefly and on point! :D Thank you.

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