FFmpeg

What This Skill Does

The FFmpeg skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful interface for professional-grade multimedia processing. It acts as an abstraction layer over the industry-standard FFmpeg command-line tool, allowing users to perform complex audio and video manipulations through natural language requests. Whether you need to re-encode high-resolution footage, extract specific audio streams, burn-in subtitles, or concatenate multiple media files, this skill handles the intricate syntax, filter chains, and codec selections required to produce high-quality output.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/ffmpeg

Use Cases

• Video Transcoding: Convert media between formats (e.g., MKV to MP4) while ensuring compatibility with target containers and codecs.
• Precision Editing: Perform frame-accurate trimming and cropping to prepare clips for social media or archival storage.
• Batch Processing: Normalize audio levels, adjust frame rates, and resize large video libraries automatically.
• Subtitle Management: Embed subtitles directly into video frames (hardcoding) or mux them as selectable streams within a container.
• Stream Manipulation: Extract or map specific audio/video channels from complex multi-track source files.

Example Prompts

1. "Convert input.mkv to an MP4 video, resize it to 720p, and ensure the audio is encoded as AAC at 192kbps."
2. "Extract the first audio stream from 'movie.mp4' and save it as a high-quality AAC file without the video track."
3. "Take these three video files and concatenate them into one, making sure to scale them all to 1080p before merging to avoid errors."

Tips & Limitations

FFmpeg is powerful but computationally expensive. When dealing with high-definition files, consider using hardware acceleration where available. Always pay attention to the order of operations: putting -ss before -i is significantly faster for seeking, but placing it after -i provides frame accuracy. Remember that containers and codecs have specific compatibility constraints (e.g., VP9 is preferred for WebM, not MP4). Filter chains are sensitive to syntax; when scaling and cropping, the sequence in your command significantly alters the final visual result. Ensure you have sufficient disk space when processing large files, as FFmpeg creates new output files rather than modifying inputs in-place.