Posted by gmendoza on February 21, 2010 under Tech Tips | 
If you have a source video file encoded with an AC3 Dolby Digital audio stream, you can extract the audio in it’s native format using FFMpeg.
The following example shows how to identify the available audio streams of the file video.avi. Just use ffmpeg without any output options, and you can see there are two streams (0.0 and 0.1), the second is AC3 audio.
ffmpeg -i video.avi
Input #0, avi, from 'video.avi':
Duration: 01:17:57.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1587 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 672x576 (snipped for brevity)
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified
The following command will extract the AC3 audio stream to a file called audio.ac3.
ffmpeg -i video.avi -acodec copy audio.ac3
Input #0, avi, from 'video.avi':
Duration: 01:17:57.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1587 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 672x576 (snipped for brevity)
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
Output #0, ac3, to 'audio.ac3':
Stream #0.0: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size= 255799kB time=4677.51 bitrate= 448.0kbits/s
video:0kB audio:255799kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.000000%
Verify the file was created. The output below shows that this stream is about 250Mb.
ls -lh audio.ac3
-rw-r--r-- 1 username gmendoza 250M 2010-02-21 09:47 audio.ac3
You can now use ffmpeg again to show that audio.ac3 only contains the ac3 audio stream.
ffmpeg -i audio.ac3
Input #0, ac3, from 'audio.ac3':
Duration: 01:17:57.46, bitrate: 448 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified
Now that you have extracted the audio stream, you can do anything you wish with it. Enjoy.
Posted by gmendoza on February 13, 2010 under Tech Tips |
3gp is the container format used when recording video with many mobile phones, which can be a pain when trying to view them using a number of multimedia players. Fortunately, converting videos from 3gp to XviD AVI is easy with FFmpeg.
Usually, there’s not much to the quality of these types of source video files, so many of the more complex video and audio options aren’t needed. A simple FFmpeg command that retains as much quality as possible would look like the following.
ffmpeg -i video.3gp -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec libxvid -qscale 2 -f avi video.avi
Posted by gmendoza on December 15, 2009 under Tech Tips |
Previously, I described how to Extract Audio from Video Files to WAV using Mplayer. Another method using FFmpeg instead of Mplayer was also pointed out in the post titled Add Stereo Audio Tracks to MKV Files, and I figured it would be useful to outline the quick one-step process in a post all by itself.
Here’s an example of extracting the audio from a video file called video.mkv and saving it to a file called audio.wav. This very well could have been an AVI, MPEG, or any other video format that FFmpeg can decode.
ffmpeg -i video.mkv -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 audio.wav
It should also be mentioned that your source video file may have multiple audio channels or streams. For example, you may have both English AC3 and DTS channels, but you may also have other audio streams for other languages, directors comments, etc. If you want more control over which stream you are using, first identify them all with ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -i video.mkv
[snipped for brevity]
Input #0, matroska, from 'video.mkv':
Duration: 01:30:38.78, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720, PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 23.98 tbr, 1k tbn, 47.95 tbc
Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16
Stream #0.2(eng): Subtitle: 0x0000
Stream #0.3(heb): Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16
Stream #0.4(heb): Subtitle: 0x0000
Stream #0.5: Attachment: 0x0000
Stream #0.6: Attachment: 0x0000
At least one output file must be specified
From the example above, you see that Stream #0.0 is labeled as being an English video stream with h264 encoding. Stream #0.1 and #0.3 are both audio streams, but #0.1 is English AC3 5.1 and #0.3 is Hebrew MP3 stereo. Simply reference the stream id with the -map option in the following format.
ffmpeg -i video.mkv -map 0:1 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 audio.wav
[snipped for brevity]
Output #0, wav, to 'audio.wav':
Stream #0.0(eng): Audio: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 1536 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
[snipped for brevity]
Now that you have a PCM WAV file, you can manipulated it however you like, e.g. encode to MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.
lame -V0 -q0 --vbr-new audio.wav audio.mp3
oggenc -q6 audio.wav
flac audio.wav