Every once in a while, a friend will ask me for help downloading a video or converting something so it works with Premier. For those held under the terrible reign of a certain criminal lord, their solution might be to wait for Media Encoder to open and guess through its drop downs. For those who do not afford a slice of their soul as sacrifice, free online video converters are often a first choice. Here I present a guide on how to use FFMPEG, a free and open source tool to do some simple conversions. No uploading, no downloading, no limits, and its probably faster.

The first revision of this article is for Windows, I may update it with a closer guide on Mac and on Linux.

There are a lot of free programs on the internet that are, on the whole, better than at least many free sites on the internet. One reason is that if you are on a website, it is costing the website owner money to have it, especially if it is doing some process for you in the cloud (such as converting videos). Small programs are a lot cheaper to though on Github or the like (free), and just use the computing power you already have.

The easiest kind of program to make that stands the test of time and platform differences has been command line programs. Even some phone apps take advantage of these behind the scenes. Command line programs only have one kind of way of showing you things and taking your input, raw text. Don't worry if command line sounds scary, the little guys are just as scared of you as you are of them.

On Windows, we can interact with command line programs with Powershell, which you might think of as a window into if Windows itself was a command line program. To open Powershell, which we will later use for FFMPEG to convert videos, open Windows Terminal, an app.

It should show up on modern versions of Windows just by typing "term-" into the start menu. If you can't find Windows Terminal, you might need to install it from the Windows Store. Click here and get it, or you can also open it from there.

Ouch. That acronym does not really tell you anything, does it? The last four words, MPEG, is the name of a standards organization that helps design formats like MP4, which hopefully sounds more familiar to you. As far as I know, it is not responsible for MP3, though, FFMPEG can also convert audio just the same as video.

You can download FFMPEG for Windows here, but unfortunately it's not quite as easy as installing most other programs, even most command line programs. Look for a link on that page like ffmpeg-X.X-full_build.zip among some other links. You can just download this to your Downloads folder or Desktop for now. You might trust that this is not a virus since it is a mirror on a reputable site, Github, and is linked to more or less from the official project website, though I think that many choose to download from gyan.dev

Once you have downloaded FFMPEG's zip file, we will decompress it. Open File Explorer and navigate to where you downloaded it. Go ahead and right click → Extract All...

Extracting FFMPEG

... And remove the last bit after the last "\" in the dialog. Extract it here. The window should close and you should be left with a new, non-zipped folder in your downloads location called ffmpeg-X.X-full_build. Rename this folder to just FFMPEG.

I would open a second File Explorer window now, and navigate to C:\Program Files\. Drag, or cut-and-paste the new FFMPEG folder into the Program Files directory. Take some care not to drop it into any of the nested folders. You should receive a UAC dialog asking for permission, just like when installing a normal program. You can now delete the .zip file you downloaded and extracted earlier.

We are done with File Explorer. Search in the start menu for "environment variables", you're looking for the option to "Edit the system environment variables" to click. These are just a fancy term for a particularly flexible configuration option that is on most operating systems. A button at the bottom right of the new dialog that showed up says "Enironment Variables...", click it. Scroll down on the top to where the left, Variable column says "Path", select it, and chose "Edit" below the box. In the yet-another-new-window, click "Browse..." on the right and find C:\Program Files\FFMPEG on your computer, and select the "bin" folder inside it. Now you can click 🆗, 🆗, 🆗, 🆗, and if all went well, you're done installing! As always, if you know me and I know you, you can ask for help if you got lost.

If you had Windows Terminal still open, close it and reopen it. Otherwise, just open it.

¹ Type ffmpeg and press enter into the window. Expect to be greeted by a wall of white text. If the text is red, something has gone wrong and you might want to make sure you did not missed a step above.

Now lets covert a video. I will not concern you with anything command line here other than ffmpeg itself, so the first step is to find the exact location of the video you want to convert. You should probably be able to find this by shift+right clicking the video file and selecting the "Copy as path" option.

Return to Windows Terminal. Type ffmpeg -i, a space (important), and then paste your video path. The -i might be strange to see if you have not used a command line program, but in this case all it means is that the video is an input to FFMPEG. Put another space (important), and paste the path again. Now, replace the file extension with the one you want to end up with. Make sure that both paths' quotes are closed. Press enter.

You should be should a big wall of changing white or yellow text now, and wait a bit for it to finish. When finished, the text will stop changing and the bottom line should be something like "PS >". That is all! Your converted video will be next to the original video. If you want to ever convert again, continue from ¹ three paragraphs up.

Let me know if this was helpful, or if you have any improvement suggestions for this guide.🔣