FFmpeg: How To Crop Videos, With Examples

Dushmantha Charaka January 07, 2020 0 Comments

This article explains how to crop videos using FFmpeg (with examples) from the command line. It's especially useful for batch cropping multiple videos, but some (me included) might also prefer this over a fully fledged video editor for doing some video cropping. The article also includes screenshots that show exactly what's being cropped.

To exemplify applying the FFmpeg crop filter I'm using this 500x300 image, in which each square has a size of 100x100 pixels:

For each example command, the image is cropped using the actual FFmpeg crop command from that example, so you can see exactly what happens when using it. This is possible because the same commands can also be used to crop.

To be able to use these commands, you'll need to have FFmpeg installed on your system. FFmpeg is a free and open-source project consisting of various libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the FFmpeg command line program, which can be used for transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, and post-production effects.