Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg (opens in new tab)

It also supports the OpenFX plugin format: http://openfx.sourceforge.net/

Once you grok filter_complex, it becomes a lot easier to understand how people get very complex results out of ffmpeg.

Of less renown but worthy of a mention is the tee[1] muxer. It lets you take the same resulting input and pass it to different destinations. Incredibly handy, ie, for outputting DASH, HLS, and a regular ol mp4 from the same command WITHOUT having to redo the scaling or anything else that was in the filter_complex.

[0] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Filtergraph-syntax-1

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Examples-12 (links to examples which is where you should start, scroll up to see docs)

Here's a short clip of 8 videos playing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK52DY6sq9U

or a better video starting from the basic UI, starting videos, zooming them to "cover" mode, and splitting and starting more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH9h3XGkFmc

Here's the app

https://mopho-v.org

You can also open multiple windows so if you have multiple monitors you can easily run one more videos per monitor until your computer can't keep up.

note: It's pretty alpha, several bugs, but I've used it several times a week, living with it's bugs, for a couple of years. Not sure I can justify fixing it up as I'm the only person using it AFAICT but maybe it will give others inspiration. The code I'm sure is a mess. It was my first React app (a reason to give React a try).

It also works pretty good in VR as in on Oculus Rift I open my desktop and manipulate videos and splits with the touch controllers as a mouse. No particular VR support, just saying that most of the features have clickable buttons so it's easy to use in VR.

A big limit is being Electron it can only play what Chromium plays (mp4, mkv, vp8, vp9). I've been wanting to look info FFMpeg in wasm to add support for other formats, saw the post yesterday someone had done something. I figured it might be too slow and that figuring out how to sync audio might be painful but it's still on my magical "someday I might" to do list. Since Chromium already uses ffmpeg it might be easier to just patch Electron to use ffmpeg with all features enabled instead of just the few that ship with Chrome.

It did the trick for me (my Kickstarter got funded!) and I later wrote a blog post about how to use Keynote to add special effects to video on the cheap.

1: https://medium.com/hackernoon/adding-visual-effects-to-your-...

A lot of people are producing virtual choir videos right now, but I suspect few use a process similar to mine. I use Audacity to edit the audio separately, then crop the input videos using a face-aware cropping script (which uses https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition), then generate a video grid using ffmpeg + xgrid.

However, it really feels like video editing isn't something that should be done on the command line. Does anyone know of decent GUI frontends to ffmpeg?

I can for instance, add and remove things and move them around the screen with a mouse, without having to restart things or do any math - sounds way more convenient.

Surely this remarkable tool has a command or filter to fit videos within a specified area, whether it be zoom, pan, shortest height, and the like