In my ever-growing collection of smart FFmpeg tricks, here is a way of converting from one container format to another. Here I will convert from a QuickTime (.mov) file to a standard MPEG-4 (.mp4), but the recipe should work between other formats too. If you came here to just see the solution, here you go: ffmpeg -i infile.mov -acodec copy -vcodec copy outfile.mp4 In the following I will explain everything in a little more detail....
This is a note to self, and hopefully others, about how to easily and quickly trim videos without recompressing the file. I often have long video recordings that I want to split or trim. Splitting and trimming are temporal transformations and should not be confused with the spatial transformation cropping. Cropping a video means cutting out parts of the image, and I have another blog post on cropping video files using FFmpeg....
I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS for the past year, but have often relied on my old MacBook for doing various things that I haven’t easily figured out how to do in Linux. One of those things is to trim video files non-destructively. This is quite simple to do in QuickTime, although Apple now forces you to save the file with a QuickTime container (.mov) even though there is still only MPEG-4 compression in the file (h....
I am working on finalizing an electronic version of a large PDF file (600 page NIME proceedings), and have had some problems optimizing the PDF file. This may not be so strange, since the file is an assembly of 130 individual PDF files all made by different people and using all sorts of programs and OS. Usually, PDFCompress works wonders when it comes to reducing PDF file sizes, but for the proceedings-file it choked at some of the fonts....