Combine one image + one audio file to make one video using FFmpeg

Question

This should be pretty trivial, but I can't find a way to get it to work.

I want FFmpeg to take one JPEG image and an audio file as input and generate a video file of the same duration as the audio file (by stretching the still image for the whole duration).

I don't care very much about what video codec is used for output, but it is vital that I can use "copy" as the audio codec (i.e. copy the audio stream without transcoding it).

What is the right command line that would do that?

I tried:

ffmpeg -i image8.jpg -i sound11.amr -acodec copy test.avi

and tried a lot of combinations with and without -s 640x360, -loop_input, -shortest, -t xxx, -r 0.1 (artificially low frame rate in the hope that the video would be longer) and -f image2

Either I get errors or I get a video file of the duration of one frame.

I've googled around and found a dozen of proposed solutions (supposedly to this very same question) none of which works.

Can anybody suggest a working command and explain the rationale behind it?

Solution 1

The order of options in the command line matters. The following works for my case:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i img.jpg -i music.mp3 -shortest -acodec copy -vcodec mjpeg result.mkv

In a more general case, where image.jpg and audio.wav are your input, you can use the following command, adapted from the FFmpeg wiki:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i ima.jpg -i audio.wav -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a aac -b:a 192k -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest out.mp4

This would use the libx264 encoder and provide you with better compression than the MJPEG codec used above. The audio is AAC, with the built-in ffmpeg AAC encoder.

Solution 2

Even easier:

ffmpeg -i ep1.png -i ep1.wav ep1.flv

FFmpeg will try to pick the best codec automatically, depending on the extension of your output file.

Update: I noticed YouTube has difficulty processing the video (gets stuck at 95%) I think because there's only one frame. The solution I found to make YouTube happy: add more frames. Also, I added-acodec copy to preserve the audio quality. You need -shortest or it loops forever. (It stops at the end of the shortest stream, which is the audio, because the image loop is infinite.) The order of your options is very important for speed, as filters (and such) are processed in the order you specify. If you change the order of these parameters, the results are dramatically different.

ffmpeg -r 1 -loop 1 -i ep1.jpg -i ep1.wav -acodec copy -r 1 -shortest -vf scale=1280:720 ep1.flv

Also notice that I set the frame rate twice, that's not an accident--the first frame rate is for the input, second is for the output. If you do this correctly, there should only be one frame per second of video, which means it encodes relatively fast. Also I set the resolution to 720p here, which means you should get HD audio on YouTube :-)

Solution 3

You're making it way harder than it has to be. FFmpeg is a lot smarter than you give it credit for--it knows you want the video to be the same length as your audio track.

ffmpeg -i still.png -i narrate.wav -acodec libvo_aacenc -vcodec libx264 final.flv

pause

The only attributes you have to specify are the input filenames, the output codecs, and the output filename (which eo ipso includes the output container, ).

Of course, it makes sense to start with a still image that shares the same dimensions as your eventual video; if you are using a dedicated image editor instead of specifying output dimensions for FFmpeg to meet, you need to make sure your input dimensions are even numbers.

Output size is one of FFmpeg's most common hang-ups; some codecs are more restricted in output dimensions than others, but no output can have odd-number height- or width attributes.

The pause command at the end of the batch file keeps the CLI open--the best way to debug your command line is by reading the error messages it generates. They are extremely specific--and the best documentation FFmpeg has--but the developers' hard work is wasted if you allow the window to close before you can read them.

The command shell has a switch cmd /k that maintains an open window where you can run the same the same instructions from your batch script at the command prompt.

FFmpeg and avconv will both make you use -c:a for -acodec and -c:v for -vcodec eventually, but the old instructions work fine in the builds I use.

Nota Bene: Every commit has idiosyncracies. If your command line is failing for no apparent reason, it is often helpful to try another build--or follow the fork over to libav, where FFmpeg's most active developers have been for the last couple of years. Their transcoding tool has been renamed avconv but your batch files should work with either one.

Solution 4

The version that worked for me:

 ffmpeg -loop 1 -y -i pic.jpg -i sound.amr -shortest video.mp4

Checkout the the option -shortest must to be in front of the output file if not I get the below error:

Option shortest (finish encoding within shortest input) cannot be applied to input file pic.jpg -- you are trying to apply an input option to an output file or vice versa. Move this option before the file it belongs to. Error parsing options for input file pic.jpg.

Solution 5

From the ffmpeg manpage:

ffmpeg [[infile options][-i infile]]... {[outfile options] outfile}...

As you discovered, the infile options must come before the infile to which they apply.

This is not a bug, however, just a mechanism by which you can specify which infile arguments apply to.

View more solutions

Comments

[Captain Giraffe]

I just tried your command line and it worked as expected. Your problem might lie with the sound format. Does transcoding the sound work?

[matteo]

By "as expected" do you mean the resulting video has the same duration as the audio input? Have you played it? Isn't it one-frame-long?

[matteo]

Sound format is not the problem, transcoding the sound works

[HebertZzz]

I had a order of params issue too and it cost me hours! Too bad these sorts of problems aren't covered in the help. gregoire.org/2009/12/05/fun-with-ffmpeg

[TharakaNirmana]

Hi, I am also searching a way to create a video by combining an audio file and an image, within the android code. I figured out the command for that: ffmpeg -i allmapeople.mp3 -i Penguins.jpg video_finale.mpg I tried many 2 tutorials using ffmpeg that generates the .so file. But I still could not find out a way to combine an audio and an image. Please help me!!!

[Muhammad Umer]

this is better than chosen answer, i experimented and it's fast and file size is small..ffmpeg -y -i image.png -i audio.mp3 -c:a copy result.avi

[Ciro Santilli Путлер Капут 六四事]

related: stackoverflow.com/questions/25381086/…

[Eric]

@MuhammadUmer Youtube can't process video created this way.

[Eric]

This answer works: askubuntu.com/a/868831/216272

[Open the way]

can this also be done using a cloud service like Zapier, etc?

[wolfhammer]

How come the files end up so much bigger than [size of image] + [size of audio file]? I would expect the video compression to go crazy with a constant frame?

[matteo]

It depends on the video codec you use. If you are copying the commands in my examples, I'm using mjpeg as the codec, which compresses each frame separately, so it takes no advantage of the fact that all frames are equal. Also, I think that even other codecs would recode the whole frame every once in a while, i.e. every N-th frame, so you would get a much smaller file but still much bigger than just the size of the image+sound. They do so because (a) otherwise the decoder would need to read the whole file from the beginning even if you just want to jump to the last frame, and

[matteo]

(b) any error or bit corruption during the transmission at a given moment would affect the decoded video starting from that point forever, would never recover

[matteo]

I must be using a different version than youurs (if you have tried your command and it works as you describe), because, as I already mention in the question, I had already tried your exact same command and I get a video of the duration of 1 frame (a fraction of a second), NOT the duration of the audio file. I did expect it to be intelligent, but (in my version) it proved to be not.

[xerox102]

Hey Matteo, yes, I did execute that code, and yes, it works as advertised. I'm sure there are plenty of halfwits that would be so careless as to make such claims without testing them, so I'll try not to be offended :) In a full post below I will supply Pastebin links to FFmpeg console output and MediaInfo data on input files and final output file. My input files, my batch file, my output file are on a GoogleDrive where they are freely downloadable, if you would like to test them against your FFmpeg build.

[coding_idiot]

@ShinMuraoka Mine is a win-64 ffmpeg build compiled on: Jan 6 2013, at: 16:16:53 Neither your solution nor @matteo solution worked for me. Also, I downloaded your files from Google Drive, but it didn't gave the expected output (the output file was black contained only audio). Please help me in figuring out the right command to be used.

[Jonathan Baldwin]

"no output can have odd-number height- or width attributes" Not true. Set pix_fmt to something that doesn't have chroma subsampling, like rgb24 or yuv444p, then make sure the codec and container support it and have no further restrictions. With regards to pix_fmt, FFmpeg is less than intelligent; it assumes yuv420p (which has chroma subsampling) unless you tell it otherwise.

[wim]

Option shortest (finish encoding within shortest input) cannot be applied to input file image.jpg -- you are trying to apply an input option to an output file or vice versa. Move this option before the file it belongs to.

[Colonel Panic]

Great, that worked. However, given a 4MB mp3 and a 200 KB jpeg, it created a 100 MB video. Obviously, the file doesn't need to be any bigger than 4.2 MB. Any way to make it more efficient?

[Muhammad Umer]

use ffmpeg -y -i image.png -i audio.mp3 -c:a copy result.avi this works better!!!?!??!?!

[neelsg]

Can you explain how the command you added works?

[Ahmad Arslan]

Worked but very very slow :( can we get fast speed of ffmpeg processing ?? Any command which is running from ffmpeg very slow.

[PJ Brunet]

Also it's possible your audio file won't be compatible with your .flv container. In that case, you should just try a different (output) container, like .webm, .avi or whatever format, till you find a container format that's compatible with your audio file.

[Admin]

Used this for a .JPG and .MP3 to make an MP4 - worked perfectly. The FLV I created from the JPG/MP3 didn't seem to work - which may be as per the previous comments warning.

[toster-cx]

@Arslan Ahmad, to speed things up copy the audio like in the comment above and drop the framerate with -framerate 1. Should be very fast. Some video codecs get horrible seeking at playback tho.

[JZ11]

How would you use a short video instead of an image and loop the video until the audio ends? Like loop a 10 second video until the 3 minute audio file ends?

[DavidPostill]

This answer is currently being discussed on meta.

[HugoRune]

@jonrsharpe strongly disagree. If the original author does not agree with edits that alter the code, they are free to rollback the change and in no way are obligated to accept the changes or make the answer a community wiki. @ matteo consider reverting the changes you disagree with, instead of adding a disclaimer.

[halfer]

@matteo: alternatively, you could just unaccept. I moderately agree with the edit to remove that disclaimer, as it seems a bit hostile in its current state (I appreciate that is not your intention though!) and thus would be distracting for future readers. I expect the various well-intentioned editors of this question would not agree that their edits were arbitrary! ;-)

[matteo]

@jonrsharpe how do I turn the answer into wiki-whatever?

[TankorSmash]

@matteo click 'edit' under answer, and in the bottom right corner there'll be a button labelled 'community whatever' and you toggle it and save

[Elisa Cha Cha]

-shortest is an output option, but you're using it as an input option. Move it before the output file and you can eliminate the -t 10, but then your answer will be pretty much the same as the others.

[Elisa Cha Cha]

This answer is not much different than the other simple "comment-answers" here.

[Elisa Cha Cha]

-shortest is an output option and may be ignored as an input option as you are using it.

[user1696603]

With the 1st example I had same experience as superuser.com/a/1041823/16966, -shortest had to be moved near end of argument list

[Basj]

The updated version works, for Youtube. I thought it was stuck at 95% but finally it worked.

[Amit]

I was creating mp4 from images and audio in two step process and then finally concatenating the multiple videos to create final one. The final video was not playing in my Android App with error "Cant play the video ". with your options it worked like charm and video is working in Android app. thanks.

[Blaizz]

This is an incomplete command that couldn't possibly work. Although I can fix and debug your command, I won't do your work for you, so please edit your answer and fix it yourself. I also noticed that your video size is not what matteo wanted.

[Web User]

@Amit I need to combine a set of images, video clips and an audio track to create a single video file (preferably ogg, but that is less relevant at this point). In addition, I need to create some transition effects between adjacent images. Is there any way to script this whole task using ffmpeg and/or other command line tools? The goal is to automate the task and using a command line process.

[Amit]

@Web User - First make individual videos for each image and corresponding audio using cmd - "ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "+imgName+" -i "+audioFileName+" -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 192k -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest "+videoOutFilename ; Then use following to concatenate all videos to amke a single one.. "ffmpeg -f concat -i " +listfilename+" -c copy " +outputDir+"Final_Video.mp4" where listfilename is a file containng names of all video files

[Web User]

@Amit thanks for the commands! How about transitions? e.g. a cross-fade effect lasting 3 seconds between two images.

[maniempire]

This solution worked perfect for me.

[NineCattoRules]

got this: No pixel format specified, yuvj420p for H.264 encoding chosen. Use -pix_fmt yuv420p for compatibility with outdated media players. [libx264 @ 0x2b5c940] height not divisible by 2 (700x457) ... this works: ffmpeg -r 1 -loop 1 -i ep1.jpg -i ep1.wav -acodec copy -r 1 -shortest -vf scale=1280:-2 video.mp4

[xerox102]

what about multiple images? I need the image to change at some specific time to another image. I'd like to be able to specify them on the command line with a time parameter for each one.

[Admin]

what about multiple images? I need the image to change at some specific time to another image. I'd like to be able to specify them on the command line with a time parameter for each one.

[Admin]

what about multiple images? I need the image to change at some specific time to another image. I'd like to be able to specify them on the command line with a time parameter for each one.

[DannyB]

Thanks for this. Most of the other answers didnt work for me (using ffmpeg on Alpine linux). This answer has the shortest command that worked flawlessly for me.

[Suraj Jain]

Thanks, A Lot, It helped me, for batch convert check my answer below based on his answer.

[Ciro Santilli Путлер Капут 六四事]

@mattwilkie fixed

[Jesse Steele]

This way worked for me, the extra settings broke the process.

[287352]

The mjpeg option should just be deleted. It was outdated then and now is just archaic. There's very few reasons to encode in mjpeg and those are only streaming/record reasons.

[Kokizzu]

ffmpeg -r 1 -loop 1 -y -i 1.jpg -i 1.m4a -c:a copy -r 1 -vcodec libx264 -shortest 1.avi this should be the best answer, '__') only took 2 secs to encode, the other answers took more than 10 minutes and resulting in a very huge size

[Vix]

libvo_aacenc has been deprecated due to it being low quality, aac is the recommended audio encoder now - according to askubuntu.com/a/1034195/624083

[nisetama]

When I tried creating a video using this method, my version of Movist (a macOS video player) only played the video for a split second, and my version of VLC displayed a black background instead of the background image. A video created using PJ Brunet's method played correctly in VLC, but there was no audio in Movist. I didn't really even need a background image, so I ended up using a low-resolution black background to reduce file size and encoding time: convert -size 256x144 xc:black /tmp/a.png;ffmpeg -loop 1 -i /tmp/a.png -i input.m4a -c:v libx264 -crf 51 -c:a copy -shortest output.mp4.

[zzapper]

ffmpeg -loop 1 -y -i slide02.jpg -i slide02.aac -shortest slide02.mp4 # thanks just what I needed

[Paolo]

Awesome! The second update worked for youtube

[Tony M]

confirmed this works with mp3 to produce .mov which play in Quicktime on Mac OS 11; ie, ffmpeg -r 1 -loop 1 -i m.jpg -i m.mp3 -acodec copy -r 1 -shortest -vf scale=1280:720 m.mov

[Shakiba Moshiri]

Unknown encoder 'libvo_aacenc' for ffmpeg version 3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers

[Chris Wolf]

I too am on MacOS and my sound file is also MP3, but your command took longer and generated a larger MP4 then just letting ffmpeg figure it out as @PJ Brunet suggests: ffmpeg -i image.jpeg -i audio.mp3 result.mp4 ffmpeg version N-98301-gce297b44d3-tessus

[Vitaly Zdanevich]

But -r 1 is increase encoding time and reduce file size (because of 1 FPS).

[Vitaly Zdanevich]

-r 1 set FPS to 1 and improve encoding time and file size.

[mbelsky]

It works well, thank you. Btw it is not necessary to set -r twice, you can find it on the wiki page: trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Slideshow#Framerates