Before we look at using FFmpeg, first we need to take a quick look at what a media file exactly is. In this article, we are interested in using it to convert files, so we won't be taking a deep dive into its entire feature set. It can be downloaded from the FFmpeg website or through most package managers.įFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. It's available on many different operating systems and is included in some operating systems by default. In this article I'll be using FFmpeg through the command-line tool ffmpeg, which is only a single, small piece of the FFmpeg project. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the Moving Picture Experts Group or the myriad multimedia formats it has created. It's often used behind the scenes in many other media-related projects. Enter FFmpeg.įFmpeg is a collection of different projects for handling multimedia files. Tools like Audacity or Handbrake are fantastic, but sometimes you just want to change a file from one format into another quickly. There are many open source tools out there for editing, tweaking, and converting multimedia into exactly what you need. What I want is an equivalent mp4 file (so the same audio track chosen). I get roughly the same size file, but the default audio track is stream #0:1. More background, when I try to turn this into a mp4 file with the following command:įfmpeg -i da-orig.mpg -c copy -map 0 da-copy.mp4 Is it something within the mpg container format or are players choosing the stream that has the lowest id (0x80) ? I'd like to understand how this is chosen.

When I play this file in VLC / QuickTime it seems that Audio Track 4 is the default. Stream #0:0: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, progressive), 720x480, Closed Captions, 31 fps, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbnĬpb: bitrate max/min/avg: 750 buffer size: 1835008 vbv_delay: N/A I have some mpg files that I transcoded from DVDs I bought a long time ago (maybe 20 years ago).

Ffmpeg copy audio bitrate