website/content/blog/trim-video-ffmpeg.md

title	date	draft	tags	math
How to trim a video using FFMPEG	2022-09-28T18:46:32-04:00	false		false

Recently I came across a video that I wanted to split up into multiple files. Given my love for ffmpeg the video/audio swiss armyknife, I knew there had to be a solution for cutting a video on the terminal. Luckily on AskUbuntu, Luis Alvarado provides a command snippet. This post will go into slightly more detail on the flags used in the command

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 \
	-t 00:30:00 \
	-i input.mp4 \
	-vcodec copy \
	-acodec copy \
	output.mp4

Command	Description
-ss	Position within the input file. Most file formats do not allow exact seeking, so ffmpeg will pick the closest seek point. Format is in time duration notation.
-t	Limits the duration of data read from the input file. Format is in time duration notation.
-vcodec	Format used to transcribe the video. Use copy to not transcribe to a different format.
-acodec	Format used to transcribe the audio. Use copy to not transcribe to a different format.

Time duration notation follows the format <HH>:<MM>:<SS> where HH is the number of hours, MM is the number of minutes, and SS is the number of seconds.

For this command in general, the output video length would be the same time duration as specified in the -t flag.