FFmpeg – The Complete Guide

Comprehensive introduction to FFmpeg, media transcoding and streaming, with practical examples and hands-on demos

Created by: Syed Andaleeb Roomy
Software Engineer who loves to build interesting products

What Will I Learn?

• Have a crystal clear understanding of FFmpeg architecture and internal pipeline.
• Construct complex filter graphs to manipulate media.
• Understand what happens during transcoding.
• Get a good overview of FFmpeg and its applications.
• Set up FFmpeg on popular operating systems.
• Inspect any media with ffprobe to extract valuable information.
• Play audio/video with ffplay from the command line.
• Learn the basics of audio/video, codecs, and containers.
• Learn about different inputs, outputs, and stream selection.
• Understand factors for choosing a codec.
• Encode audio/video using various codecs with FFmpeg.
• Learn and apply rate control techniques and additional details for H.264 encoding.
• Understand how media streaming works
• Learn about popular streaming protocols including RTMP, SRT, HTTP
• Learn details about progressive download of single-quality media
• Understand adaptive streaming concepts
• Learn about HLS and MPEG-DASH
• Grasp the details around encoding media for adaptive streaming
• Generate HLS and MPEG-DASH streams with FFmpeg
• Learn about some very useful and practical applications where FFmpeg can be used.
• Perform common video manipulation tasks by constructing filter graphs with FFmpeg.
• Separate, mix, and manipulate audio with FFmpeg audio filters.

Requirements

• None.
• No prior knowledge of audio/video, transcoding or FFmpeg is needed.
• Concepts are explained gradually with easy-to-follow diagrams.
• We start with simple examples and build up more complex scenarios in a step-by-step fashion.

Target audience

• Anyone interested to learn about, and work with audio and video
• Anyone interested in media transcoding and streaming
• Software developers
• Streaming media professionals
• System integrators
• Broadcast engineers
• System administrators
• Video enthusiasts