The Swiss Army Knife of Video

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

Basic Conversion

To convert media from one format to another:

ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4

Use the -crf flag to control quality. -crf 18 is nearly lossless, while -crf 23 is the default.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 output.mp4