How to process video with FFmpeg. Framework syntax from Zero to Hero.

The article quickly catches you up to speed on crucial blocks of FFmpeg and key concepts and allows you to start creating difficult commands for multimedia processing and understand commands that have been created by anybody else.

✨ Introduction

Processing video is the modern mainstream of current applications and we as developers should follow it. At first, it may seem a pretty difficult topic and its required special education. Fortunately for us, there are some frameworks that aim to simplify this process and provide a declarative way to express our intention in which way we need to process video.

One of those frameworks is FFmpeg. It provides a special Command Line Interface (CLI). For example, this simple command concatenates two video files input1.avi and input2.avi in one with a name output.avi

ffmpeg -i input1.avi -i input2.avi -filter_complex concat output.avi

I provided this command just for you to get a taste of how the difficult process may be expressed in a couple of words of the CLI command. Don’t worry if you see a pretty long and scary FFmpeg command…