FFmpeg – Split video multiple parts

ffmpegsplitvideo editing

I read the following thread, and the solution works if I want to split a video into pieces every two minutes: Split video file into pieces with ffmpeg

The problem is that I want to split a video into pieces every 15 seconds.

When I use the following command:

for i in {00..49}
 do ffmpeg -i fff.avi -sameq -ss 00:$[ i*2 ]:00 -t 00:00:15 output_$i.avi
done

it will output 15-second video sequences, but not in order. It will skip parts of the video, so I end up with a few 15 second clips, but not all the clips. I want to be able to use ffmpeg to split any video I throw at it into many pieces based on the time I give it.

Best Answer

I found the answer. It turns out I was having problems because I didn't have the proper FFmpeg installed, but a fork of ffmpeg.

This code works for me:

ffmpeg -i fff.avi -acodec copy -f segment -segment_time 10 -vcodec copy -reset_timestamps 1 -map 0 fff%d.avi

fff.avi is the name of the source clip. Change -segment_time 10 to the general duration you want for each segment. If you want each clip to be about 40 seconds, then use -segment_time 40. Use -an after -map 0 if you don't want the resulting clips to have sound.

Related Solutions

Split Video – How to Split Video File into Pieces with FFmpeg

You forgot to use backticks - or better: $( ) subshell - in the seq invocation. This works:

for i in $( seq 50 );
do ffmpeg -i input.mpg -sameq -ss 00:`expr $i \* 2 - 2`:00 -t 00:02:00 output.mpg; done

Another thing is that you probably don't want output.mpg to be overwritten in each run, do you? :) Use $i in the output filename as well.

Apart from that: In bash, you can just use $(( )) or $[ ] instead of expr - it also looks more clear (in my opinion). Also, there is no need for seq - brace expansion is all you need to get a sequence. Here's an example:

for i in {1..50}
 do ffmpeg -i input.mpg -sameq -ss 00:$[ i* 2 - 2 ]:00 -t 00:02:00 output_$i.mpg
done

Another good thing about braces is that you can have leading zeros in the names (very useful for file sorting in the future):

for i in {01..50}
 do ffmpeg -i input.mpg -sameq -ss 00:$[ i* 2 - 2 ]:00 -t 00:02:00 output_$i.mpg
done

Notice as well, that i*2 - 2 can be easily simplified to i*2 if you just change the range:

for i in {00..49}
 do ffmpeg -i input.mpg -sameq -ss 00:$[ i*2 ]:00 -t 00:02:00 output_$i.mpg
done

ffmpeg -pattern_type glob Not Loading Files in Correct Order

ffmpeg concat same file types

You could use a command like this to concatenate the list of files any way you want:

ffmpeg -f concat -i <( for f in *.wav; do echo "file '$(pwd)/$f'"; done ) \
         output.wav

The above can only work if the files you're concatenating are all the same codecs. So they'd all have to be .wav or .mpg for example.

NOTE: You need to have ffmpeg v1.1 or higher to use the concat demuxer, you can read more about the above example and also how to concatenate different codecs using this technique on the ffmpeg website.

ffmpeg using printf formatters

Ffmpeg can also take input using the printf formatters such as %d. This matches digits starting at 0 and going up from there in order. If the numbers were structured like this, 000 - 099, you could use this formatter, %03d, which means a series of 3 digits, zero padded.

So you could do something like this:

ffmpeg -r 25 -i %d.png -qscale 3 -s 1920x1080 -c:v wmv1 video.wmv

The above didn't quite work for me, ffmpeg was complaining about the option -c:v. I simply omitted that option and this version of the command worked as expected.

ffmpeg -r 25 -i %d.png -qscale 3 -s 1920x1080 video.wmv