FFMPEG — The Swiss Army Knife of Media Files on Mac Mini M1

Manipulate Audio/Video/Image on Mac M1 Command-Line!

I am a beginning-level YouTuber and an expert-level software engineer with 18+ years of software design, development, and management experience. I have recently launched a few YouTube channels — a first-gen immigrant lifestyle channel, a macOS user group channel, and two more channels on the way. Having to deal with a lot of video files on my shiny Mac Mini M1 system is fun as it is an awesome machine for dealing with H.265 (HEVC) videos that are spet out by the newer camera gears like the Go Pro. However, as a software engineer, I often prefer automation when it comes to repetitive tasks.

Now that I know I am serious about my YouTube efforts, I needed to automate many of my routine video tasks such as inserting intro/outro and many other tasks. I live Final Cut Pro and Screenflow for all my video editing work but I am interested in producing many videos where automation will help.

So I decided to put my skills to work and explore tools that can be handled using shell scripts and other programming languages. FFMPEG — the Swiss Army Knife of media files — became my center of interest. In this article, I will discuss a few common things that you can do with FFMPEG on a Mac Mini M1 without making your computer…