FFmpeg Tutorial

Essential FFmpeg Video Filters You Need to Know

Complete reference of the most useful FFmpeg video filters — scale, crop, rotate, transpose, hflip, vflip, fps, boxblur, unsharp. Copy-ready commands with explanations.

Resizing & Scaling

Scale to 1080p width (auto height)

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=1920:-1 output-1080p.mp4

Scale to fit 480x320 (thumbnail size)

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=480:320 output-480x320.mp4

Cropping & Orientation

Crop center portion (1280x720 from 4K)

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf crop=w=1280:h=720:x=(in_w-1280)/2:y=(in_h-720)/2 center-crop.mp4

Rotate 90° (vertical phone video → horizontal)

ffmpeg -i vertical.mp4 -vf "transpose=1,format=yuv420p" horizontal.mp4