Videos need editing or repair to improve quality and enhance the viewing experience. Sometimes, however good in quality, you may just want to edit, cut, sharpen, rotate, add sound or text over them. To do such tasks, there are a plethora of video editing tools. But unlike paid editing platforms, which may not let you do all the activities, FFmpeg is a complete software project for multimedia files. It has a vast suite of libraries and programs which lets you convert, edit, repair, and improve your videos.

FFmpeg multimedia framework has its distinct fan following too, owing to its multi-facet utilities.

Recently, NASA used FFmpeg to combine the high-resolution images taken from GOES-R series of Earth observation satellites to create a video. While some miles away, the game developer- Looking Glass Studios included FFmpeg video support in its latest Dark Mod Thief game version 2.06.

Everyone from end users to developers use open source FFmpeg to create, convert, record, cut, stream, encode, transcode, mux, demux, and so much more to their videos.

How does FFmpeg work?

FFmpeg is a command-line tool that uses commands to convert audio or video formats.

For example: To extract sound from a video and save it as MP3, you can use command line: $ ffmpeg -i video1.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 audio3.mp3

To increase video play back speed command line is: $ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -vf “setpts=0.5*PTS” highspeed.mpg

It can also capture and encode in real-time from various sources such as a TV capture card. FFmpeg comes with a wide range of audio and video codecs support. You can use to fix your video-related issues of any file format on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the Unix BSDs, and Solaris systems.

What all you can do with FFmpeg?

• Decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, and filter multimedia files
• Convert video to images and images to video
• Scale, pad, crop, flip, rotate, blur, sharpen and de-noise video
• Speed up or slow down audio and video
• Let the computer to read the text with selected voice
• Display and record input from your webcam
• Record input from microphone or send it to loudspeakers
• Add static or dynamic text on video
• Add, edit or delete file metadata
• Preview modified input in 2, 3 or 4 windows
• Include a logo or provide Picture in Picture
• Create sound with mathematical expressions
• Resize video with a high quality polyphase filter
• Display input from 2 webcams in one window
• Set the bitrate, frame rate, maximum file size and related options
• Encode subtitles directly to the video stream
• Join various file formats, modify streams and modify audio channels

How to Repair Corrupt Video Files using FFmpeg?

Yes, it can. You can try to repair your videos using various command lines in FFmpeg. But this could be a little tricky for beginners. You should have knowledge of various command lines to perform different tasks in FFmpeg.

Also, the success of repair of corrupt videos depends upon what issue you want to fix and how badly the file is damaged.