In my ever-growing collection of smart FFmpeg tricks, here is a way of converting from one container format to another. Here I will convert from a QuickTime (.mov) file to a standard MPEG-4 (.mp4), but the recipe should work between other formats too. If you came here to just see the solution, here you go: ffmpeg -i infile.mov -acodec copy -vcodec copy outfile.mp4 In the following I will explain everything in a little more detail....
This is a note to self, and hopefully others, about how to easily and quickly trim videos without recompressing the file. I often have long video recordings that I want to split or trim. Splitting and trimming are temporal transformations and should not be confused with the spatial transformation cropping. Cropping a video means cutting out parts of the image, and I have another blog post on cropping video files using FFmpeg....
I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS for the past year, but have often relied on my old MacBook for doing various things that I haven’t easily figured out how to do in Linux. One of those things is to trim video files non-destructively. This is quite simple to do in QuickTime, although Apple now forces you to save the file with a QuickTime container (.mov) even though there is still only MPEG-4 compression in the file (h....