I’m working on Xubuntu Linux, so to install FFmpeg I just did this: So far, I haven’t needed to read or write any file format that it couldn’t handle, although in some cases it did involve some googling to figure out the required command line arguments.įFmpeg is free software and cross-platform, so you should be able to install it on Windows and Mac without too much difficulty, but I haven’t actually tried that myself. It may seem like a bit of a hack, but it’s surprisingly effective and, provided that you can figure out the correct FFmpeg command line, extremely adaptable.įFmpeg is described on its project web page as “ complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.” That’s a pretty accurate description. The basic idea is to launch FFmpeg via a pipe, which then converts raw samples to the required format (for writing) or decodes the file into raw samples (for reading). The article describes using FFmpeg to read and write video frames in Python and there’s a link to a second article showing the same thing for audio. Read and Write Video Frames in Python Using FFMPEG.

I first learned of this approach from an article on Zulko’s fascinating Python oriented blog on GitHub: Recently though, I’ve found a new way of dealing with audio and video files that is relatively painless, so I think it’s worth sharing. However, I have tended to shy away from using it for quick one-off signal processing tasks where I needed to read or write audio or video files because it always seemed like a lot of hassle figuring out which library to use and what functions to call to actually get access to the raw data. C is my favourite programming language and the one I use most often.

Ffmpeg gif c++