Making webm files

Yesterday I posted a stupidly large gif of some pumpkins flashing different colours. Then a couple of minutes later after suffering through the upload I replaced it with a teeny webm.

ffmpeg now has excellent webm support, for me it will happily pick it up with automatic detection. To make videos like the one above I use ffmpeg and let it choose its own options. I drop the audio from the video to give it a nicer gif like effect, I think from today I will tell browsers to autoplay the video snippets so they look like awesome gifs.

I do something like this:

$ ffmpeg -i VID_20161030_112003.mp4  -ss 00:00:02.0 -an coffee.webm

• -i is the input video
• -ss tells ffmpeg to start the encoding at this time stamp
  • we could pass -t to tell ffmpeg to extract a t length section of the video
• -an tells us to the use no audio
• coffee.webm is the output video and format, ffmpeg will do the right thing here

Reading: Abaddon's Gate