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Crop a video using ffmpeg

Written by Solène, on 20 December 2019.
Tags: #ffmpeg

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

If you ever need to crop a video, which mean that you want to reduce the area of the video to a square of it to trim areas you don’t want.

This is possible with ffmpeg using the video filter crop. To make the example more readable, I replaced values with variables names:

  • WIDTH = width of output video
  • HEIGHT = height of output video
  • START_LEFT = relative position of the area compared to the left, left being 0
  • START_TOP = relative position of the area compared to the top, top being 0

So the actual commands look like

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -filter:v "crop=$WIDTH:$HEIGHT:$START_LEFT:$START_TOP" output_video.mp4

If you want to crop the video to get a 320x240 video from the top-left position 500,100 the command would be

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -filter:v "crop=320:240:500:100" output_video.mp4