Verified FFmpeg Command Dataset
A snapshot of commands extracted from published articles, with execution results and reasons for exclusions. Published as machine-readable JSON and CSV. Generated 2026-09-26; later article edits may not be included.
Download
- ffmpeg-commands.json 386 KB Every command, with its execution result, skip reason, source article URL and category.
- ffmpeg-commands.csv 199 KB The same content as CSV, ready for a spreadsheet.
- ffmpeg-benchmarks.csv 16 KB Measured encodes: wall-clock seconds, output MB, VMAF/PSNR/SSIM, and the machine they ran on.
What "verified" means here
Executable examples were run against FFmpeg 8.1 with test
media as input. status is verified only for
commands that ran and exited 0.
not-executed is not a failure. It means the
harness declined to run the command, and reason says why.
The dataset makes no claim either way about whether those commands work.
And exiting successfully is not the same as producing the intended output. The exit status establishes that the syntax parses and the codecs are available; it says nothing about whether the result looks right.
Why commands were not executed (top 6 reasons, 99 of 123)
| Reason | Count |
|---|---|
| Uses shell variable or substitution | 26 |
| Input filename contains space (didactic) | 19 |
| Uses shell pipe | 18 |
| Contains network-protocol URL | 18 |
| Uses wildcard or sequence pattern | 11 |
| libaom-av1 too slow for the 60s CI budget | 7 |
Measurement environment
The benchmarks come from one physical machine. The CPU, GPU and source clip
are recorded on every row of ffmpeg-benchmarks.csv.
The source is a single 10-second 1080p30 animated clip,
so live-action or noisy footage will produce very different numbers — we
measured how different.
Breakdown by category
| Category | Commands |
|---|---|
| Filters | 306 |
| Video conversion | 186 |
| Audio processing | 152 |
| Troubleshooting | 83 |
| Fundamentals | 57 |
| Cut and join | 46 |
| Streaming | 41 |
Licence
CC BY 4.0.
Attribution is the only condition. Commercial use, redistribution, and use
as AI training or retrieval data are all permitted. Attribute it as
FFmpeg Cookbook — https://ffmpeg-cookbook.com.
The tooling that searches and serves this corpus (the
ffmpeg-cookbook-mcp package) is licensed separately. The data
itself carries no restriction.
Updates
These files update when the verification export is regenerated and may not include the latest article edits. The URLs stay the same. Last generated 2026-09-26.
Additional measurements
These records are separate from the corpus above: a silent 10-second compression comparison, and tool-command checks using a silent clip plus generated portrait test media. Both use desktop FFmpeg, not browser or phone completion and upload tests.
- Three compression settings: sizes, times, commands and SHA-256
- Size-target command checks: silent, audio retained and muted
- Comparison frames and interpretation
The compression comparison and the filter article images are cut from Tears of Steel ((CC) Blender Foundation | mango.blender.org) and processed; they are under CC BY 3.0, separate from the command corpus licence above.