Ffmpeg

This is your FFmpeg cheat sheet for video production work, especially if you're building stuff with Remotion. It covers the workflows you'll actually need: converting GIFs to web-compatible MP4s, resizing and compressing videos, extracting audio, and preparing screen recordings for programmatic video. The Remotion-specific section is genuinely useful, it explains when to pre-process with FFmpeg versus using playbackRate, and shows how to calculate speed adjustments to fit demos into voiceover timing. Each command includes the flags you need and why they matter, like why you need yuv420p for browser compatibility or how to handle the atempo limitation for extreme speeds. Basically, copy-paste commands that work instead of debugging codec issues at 2am.

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last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add digitalsamba/claude-code-video-toolkit --skill ffmpeg --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

FFmpeg for Video Production

FFmpeg is the essential tool for video/audio processing. This skill covers common operations for Remotion video projects.

Quick Reference

GIF to MP4 (Remotion-compatible)

ffmpeg -i input.gif -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p \
  -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" output.mp4

Why these flags:

-movflags faststart - Moves metadata to start for web streaming
-pix_fmt yuv420p - Ensures compatibility with most players
scale=trunc(...) - Forces even dimensions (required by most codecs)

Resize Video

# To 1920x1080 (maintain aspect ratio, add black bars)
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1920:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1920:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" output.mp4

# To 1920x1080 (crop to fill)
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1920:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1920:1080" output.mp4

# Scale to width, auto height
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1280:-2" output.mp4

Compress Video

# Good quality, smaller file (CRF 23 is default, lower = better quality)
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4

SKILL.md on GitHub