ctbrec/client/src/main/resources/html/docs/FFmpeg.md

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a multimedia framework, which comes with a very powerful command line tool to process multimedia files. It is available for all major platforms. FFmpeg can be used to manually and automatically remux recordings.

Installation

• Linux: Use the package manager of your distribution to find and install ffmpeg
• Windows:
  1. Download the latest stable version from the homepage (You probably want to get the 64-bit statically linked build)
  2. Extract the zip
  3. Add the bin directory to your PATH environment variable (If you don't know what I'm talking about, do a Youtube search for FFmpeg installation on Windows or something like that)
• macOS: See Windows

Manual remuxing

• Open a terminal (command prompt) and cd into the directory of the recording

• Run FFmpeg:

  ffmpeg -i AwesomeGirl_-2019-04-04_15-46-19_195.ts -c:v copy -c:a copy AwesomeGirl_-2019-04-04_15-46-19_195.mp4

  As you can see, the codecs for video and audio are set to copy, which means, that the recording is not reencoded, but just "copied" to another container format. You could also use mkv or avi for the output file suffix and FFmpeg would create that respective file. Depending on your hardware specs and the length of the recording, this process probably takes a few seconds up to a couple of minutes.

Automatic remuxing

FFmpeg can also be used to automatically remux recordings. ctbrec provides a post-processing mechanism for this purpose.