FFMPEG2THEORA(1)

📦 version 0.30, in ubuntu jammy

🌸 FFMPEG2THEORA 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to the ffmpeg2theora manual page 💖 it's a General Commands Manual entry, and it's genuinely one of the most useful little converters out here. no cap.

✨ NAME ✨

ffmpeg2theora — a command-line converter that makes Ogg Theora files and Ogg Vorbis files 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ffmpeg2theora [options] inputfile

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

this page is a quick lil rundown of the ffmpeg2theora command, fr fr.

ffmpeg2theora takes any media file that ffmpeg can decode and turns it into Ogg Theora for the video part and Ogg Vorbis for the audio part. that's the whole vibe 💅

✨ OPTIONS ✨

if you wanna read from standard input, just hand it - as the input filename. iconic.

these programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (-). a summary of options is included below 🫶

💖 General output options 💖

  • -o, --output — pick your output filename. if you don't give one, the output just goes to inputfile.ogv. and if you wanna dump it to standard output, say /dev/stdout as the output file ✨
  • --no-skeleton — turns off Ogg Skeleton metadata output. bye bye skeleton 💀
  • --seek-index — turns on the keyframe index inside the skeleton track 👑
  • -s, --starttime — start encoding at this time (in seconds) ⏰
  • -e, --endtime — stop encoding at this time (in seconds) 🛑
  • -p, --preset — encode the file with a v2v preset. right now there's preview, pro and videobin. run ffmpeg2theora -p info for more info 🧚

💖 Video output options 💖

  • -v, --videoquality — [0 to 10] sets the encoding quality for video (default: 6). higher values = better quality, periodt 🌈
  • -V, --videobitrate — sets the encoding bitrate for video (in kb/s) 📼
  • --soft-target — uses a large reservoir and treats the rate as a soft target. rate control is less strict, but the resulting quality is usually higher/smoother overall. soft target also lets you optionally set -v to specify a minimum allowed quality 🍓
  • --two-pass — compresses the input using two-pass rate control. this option needs the input to the to the encoder to be seekable, and it runs both passes automatically 🔁
  • --first-pass <filename> — does the first pass of a two-pass rate controlled encoding, saving the pass data to <filename> for a later second pass 💾
  • --second-pass <filename> — does the second pass of a two-pass rate controlled encoding, reading first-pass data from <filename>. the first pass data must come from a first encoding pass using identical input video for this to work properly ⚠️
  • --optimize — optimizes the output Theora video by using a full search for motion vectors instead of a hierarchical one. this can reduce video bitrate by about 5%, but it's slower, so it's disabled by default 🐢
  • --speedlevel — encoding gets faster with higher values, and the cost is quality and bandwidth (default 1). the available values depend on the version of libtheora, so check ffmpeg2theora --help for the supported values 🚀
  • -x, --width — scale to the given width (in pixels) 📐
  • -y, --height — scale to the given height (in pixels) 📏
  • --aspect — define the frame aspect ratio (e.g. 4:3, 16:9) 🖼️
  • --pixel-aspect — define the pixel aspect ratio (e.g. 1:1, 4:3) 🔍
  • -F, --framerate — output framerate, e.g 25:2 or 16 🎞️
  • --croptop, --cropbottom, --cropleft, --cropright — crop the input by the given pixels before resizing ✂️
  • -K, --keyint — [8 to 2147483647] sets the keyframe interval (default: 64) 🔑
  • -d, --buf-delay — buffer delay (in frames). longer delays allow smoother rate adaptation and give better overall quality, but they require more client side buffering and add latency. the default value is the keyframe interval for one-pass encoding (or somewhat larger if --soft-target is used), and infinite for two-pass encoding. (only works in bitrate mode) 🧊
  • --no-upscaling — only scale video or resample audio if the input is bigger than the provided parameter 🙅

💖 Video transfer options 💖

  • --pp — Video Postprocessing: denoise, deblock, deinterlacer. use --pp help for a list of available filters 🧼
  • -C, --contrast — [0.1 to 10.0] contrast correction (default: 1.0). note: lower values make the video darker 🌚
  • -B, --brightness — [-1.0 to 1.0] brightness correction (default: 0.0). note: lower values make the video darker 🌑
  • -G, --gamma — [0.1 to 10.0] gamma correction (default: 1.0). note: lower values make the video darker 🕶️
  • -P, --saturation — [0.1 to 10.0] saturation correction (default: 1.0). note: lower values make the video grey 🩶

💖 Audio output options 💖

  • -a, --audioquality — [-2 to 10] sets the encoding quality for audio (default: 1). higher values = better quality 🎧
  • -A, --audiobitrate — [32 to 500] sets the encoding bitrate for audio (in kb/s) 🔊
  • -c, --channels — set the number of output channels 🎚️
  • -H, --samplerate — set the output samplerate (in Hz) 📻

💖 Input options 💖

  • --noaudio — disable audio from the input 🤫
  • --novideo — disable video from the input 🙈
  • --deinterlace — force deinterlace. otherwise, only material marked as interlaced will be deinterlaced 🪮
  • --no-deinterlace — force deinterlace off 🚫
  • --vhook — you can use ffmpeg's vhook system, example:
ffmpeg2theora --vhook '/path/watermark.so -f wm.gif' input.dv
  • -f, --format — specify the input format 📥
  • --inputfps — override input fps 🎬
  • --audiostream id — by default the first audio stream is selected; use this to select another audio stream 🎵
  • --videostream id — by default the first video stream is selected; use this to select another audio stream 📹
  • --sync — use A/V sync from the input container. since this does not work with all input formats, you have to manually enable it if you have issues with A/V sync 🧩

💖 Subtitles options 💖

  • --subtitles — encode subtitles from the given file into a multiplexed Kate stream. the input file should be in SubRip (.srt) format, encoded in UTF-8, unless the --subtitles-encoding option is also given 📝
  • --subtitles-encoding encoding — assumes the corresponding subtitles file is encoded in the given encoding. if ffmpeg2theora was built with iconv support, all encodings supported by iconv may be used. otherwise, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) are supported. the default is UTF-8 🌐
  • --subtitles-language language — sets the language of the corresponding subtitles stream. this gets set in the corresponding Kate stream so a video player may make it available to the user for language selection. language is an ISO 639-1 or RFC 3066 ASCII string and is limited to 15 characters 🗣️
  • --subtitles-category category — sets the category of the corresponding subtitles stream. this gets set in the corresponding Kate stream so a video player may make it available to the user for selection. the default category is subtitles. suggested other categories may include transcript, commentary, lyrics, etc. category is an ASCII string and is limited to 15 characters 🏷️
  • --subtitles-ignore-non-utf8 — when reading a UTF-8 subtitles text file, any invalid UTF-8 sequence will be ignored. this may be useful if there are stray sequences in an otherwise UTF-8 file. note that, since those invalid sequences will be removed from the output, this option is not a substitute for converting a non UTF-8 file to UTF-8 ⚠️
  • --nosubtitles — disables subtitles from the input. note that subtitles explicitly loaded from external files will still be used 🚫
  • --subtitle-types — selects which subtitle types to include from the input file. allowed types are: none, all, text, spu (spu being the image based subtitles found on DVD). by default, only text based subtitles will be included. note that subtitles explicitly loaded from external files will still be used 👀

💖 Metadata options 💖

  • --artist — name of artist (director) 🎤
  • --title — title 🏷️
  • --date — date 📅
  • --location — location 📍
  • --organization — name of organization (studio) 🏢
  • --copyright — copyright ©️
  • --license — license 📜
  • --contact — contact link 🔗
  • --nometadata — disables metadata from the input 🚫
  • --no-oshash — do not include oshash of the source file (SOURCE_OSHASH) 🔒

💖 Keyframe indexing options 💖

  • --index-interval <n> — set the minimum distance between indexed keyframes to <n> ms (default: 2000) ⏱️
  • --theora-index-reserve <n> — reserve <n> bytes for the theora keyframe index 💾
  • --vorbis-index-reserve <n> — reserve <n> bytes for the vorbis keyframe index 💾
  • --kate-index-reserve <n> — reserve <n> bytes for the kate keyframe index 💾

💖 Other options 💖

  • --nice n — set niceness to n 😇
  • -h, --help — output a help message 🙋
  • --info — output json info about the input file; use -o to save json to file 🧾
  • --frontend — print status information in json, one json dict per line 🖥️

✨ EXAMPLES ✨

Encode Videos:

ffmpeg2theora videoclip.avi (will write output to videoclip.ogv)

cat something.dv | ffmpeg2theora -f dv -o output.ogv -

Encode a series of images:

ffmpeg2theora frame%06d.png -o output.ogv

Live streaming from V4L Device:

ffmpeg2theora --no-skeleton /dev/video0 -f video4linux \
              --inputfps 15 -x 160 -y 128 \
              -o - | oggfwd icast2server 8000 password /theora.ogv

(you might have to use video4linux2 depending on your hardware) 🎥

Live encoding from a DV camcorder (needs a fast machine):

dvgrab - | ffmpeg2theora -f dv -x 352 -y 288 -o output.ogv -0

Live encoding and streaming to icecast server:

dvgrab --format raw - \
| ffmpeg2theora --no-skeleton -f dv -x 160 -y 128 -o /dev/stdout - \
| oggfwd icast2server 8000 password /theora.ogv

✨ AUTHOR ✨

ffmpeg2theora was written by jan gerber <j@v2v.cc> 💜

this manual page was written by Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others) 🫶

okay that's the whole page bestie, you're officially a ffmpeg2theora girlie now 👑 this version is dated May 14, 2010, and yeah, it's the FFMPEG2THEORA(1) page from the General Commands Manual — go make some iconic ogv files, mwah 💋🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from