10 tricks you can do with FFmpeg on Linux

10 tricks you can do with FFmpeg on Linux

https://www.howtogeek.com/10-tricks-you-can-do-with-ffmpeg-on-linux/

Publish Date: 2026-03-08 13:23:00

Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com

Want to do more with the Linux terminal? You might not instinctively put videos and the command line together, but with FFmpeg you can actually do a lot with a video file just by typing a simple command in your terminal.

In case you haven’t heard of it, FFmpeg is a command line tool that can handle anything related to media. It’s available in most Linux distros’ repositories, so you just need to find and install the package to start using it.

Whether you want to quickly play a video, retrieve some information, or perform cool video-editing tricks, FFmpeg has got you covered. Here are some useful things you can do with FFmpeg on your Linux machine.

Play videos

You might already have a favorite video player, and that’s great. But sometimes, you just need a quick and simple way to watch something without opening a full graphical application. You can do that using FFmpeg’s built-in player, ffplay.

For example, to play a video, open your terminal and run:

ffplay your_video_file.mp4

Your video will pop up in a separate window, ready to play. You can control it with commands like “q” to quit, “p” to pause, and the left or right arrow keys to fast-forward or rewind.

If you desire to play your video on a loop, run:

ffplay -loop 0 your_video_file.mp4

The -loop 0 option makes it loop indefinitely. You can replace 0 with any number to set how many times it repeats.

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