(You could also burn hard subtitles into a video stream with filters.) They can either simply be dropped with -sn or be converted to a native format like mov_text. Matroska files frequently contain subtitles in a format not supported in MOV/MPEG containers by FFmpeg, esp. MKV or AVI to MP4, with FFmpeg will only keep a single – it tries to choose the best one available – audio and video stream from the input file in the output file. Taking into account the codecs used in the source material, to do as few re-encodes as possible.

I’ve written a small shell script to help me convert my videos from any source that ffmpeg supports to H.264 and any supported audio format, On your source material, desired quality and compute power. Only takes couple of seconds compared to actually re-encoding video or audio streams which often takes couple of minutes to hours, depending Natively read by macOS, you can basically just copy the streams from one container format to another one. If you’re lucky and the codecs for all the streams inside the container can be Leaving the already encoded material untouched if possible. So the key is to either always directly encode from the original material (e.g. This means that every time you re-encode video, you will lose some information, normallyĮnding up in worse quality. To consider: Almost all video codecs are lossy.

Audio: AAC (since it’s Apple native) or AC3įfmpeg, besides having a cryptic command line interface, makes it relatively easy to get from anything to MP4.

Video: H.265 (on newer Macs or iDevices > 2016) or H.264.

MacOS can natively decode different types of video and audio streams, here is what I prefer and what I want my video files to look like: Their respective codecs like H.264 for video or AAC for audio. Streams of data (video, audio, subtitles) with different codecs into a single MKV or MP4 file. Instead, both are video container formats.

To get there from almost any source material.įirst off, neither MKV nor MP4 are video codecs. Videos from all my Apple devices without the need for additional software, like VLC or IINA.įor many people not that deep into video file formats I want to explain what the supported formats for video on macOS are and how The main reason for this is that I want to be able to play back I recently started to convert all of my movies from MKV to MP4.

Ffmpeg mkv to mp4 command line