This tells FFmpeg that we want to output to an mp4 media container. I’m also assuming that benji.gif is a gif of my stubbornly smelly pug and that it is in your shell’s current working directory. I’m assuming here that your shell knows the complete path to it. Let’s break down this command and its constituent arguments. $ ffmpeg -i benji.gif -f mp4 -pix_fmt yuv420p benji.mp4 Say you have a gif of my ancient, computer illiterate pug, Benji, and you want to convert it to a video format. The easiest way to do that is to go here and find a static build for whatever platform you’re working on. To follow along you’ll need FFmpeg installed. In that light, I wrote this post to share and explain some of its functionality, especially as it relates to GIF transcoding. Maybe you can read the documentation and make some sense of it, or maybe you feel the same way about reading words as me. It’s packed with an enormous amount of functionality. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge.” “FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. For those of you who are unfamiliar, in their words: If you’ve worked with media encoding in the past decade it’s likely that you’ve come across FFmpeg. To follow along, download media files here:

Ffmpeg options ffmpeg.org