Extracting raw audio

The following recipe extracts the audio from a video file and converts it to WAV format.

ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i <input> -vn -c:a pcm_s16le -ac 2 <output.wav>

You can then use e.g. flac or lame to convert this to a more compact format.

Shortening a video

Films that you want to transcode often contain material at the beginning or end that is not very interesting. This snippet shows how to remove that using the seek options of ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -hide_banner -i <input> -ss <HH:MM:SS> -to <HH:MM:SS> \
-c:a copy -c:v copy -y <output>

Using the seek options after the input file means that the input is decoded but discarded.

Using the seek options before the input file means that ffmpeg will try to seek in the input file. This might lead to a couple of seconds of video without audio.

Using the copy option for the audio and video streams prevents ffmpeg from re-encoding the whole thing. This makes the operation very fast.

Finding and changing the sound volume on a video

Finding the volume.

ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i <input> -vn -nostats -af "volumedetect" -f null /dev/null

This will result in output that looks like this.

[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] n_samples: 102158336
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] mean_volume: -29.9 dB
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] max_volume: -11.0 dB
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] histogram_10db: 1
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] histogram_11db: 1245
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] histogram_12db: 10665
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] histogram_13db: 31675
[Parsed_volumedetect_0 @ 0x80b106000] histogram_14db: 65625

Changing the volume is done with a filter. Halving the volume is the same as reducing it by 6.0206 dB.

ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i <input> -af "volume=-6.0206dB" -c:v copy <output>

Note that this also re-encodes the audio stream.