How to Use FFmpeg in Android

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Apr 20, 2022

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FFmpeg is an open-source project full of useful libraries for processing video/audio. You can change a file format, adjust quality through compression, extract audio, create GIFs, and more.

Why did I need this? I needed to build a feature that allows a user to create a video from a series of photos for my Collage app.

Step 1

Taner Sener has created a great ffmpeg-kit library that wraps the core ffmpeg code in various wrappers for use in iOS, Android, Flutter, etc.

implementation 'com.arthenica:ffmpeg-kit-full:4.5.1-1'

• There are other packages. If you want the libx264 encoder, for example, you will want to instead go for the full-gpl package:

implementation 'com.arthenica:ffmpeg-kit-full-gpl:4.5.1-1'

• There’s no need to build the binary yourself.

Step 2

Read the documentation on the README for the ffmpeg-kit project. It’s a great overview for various topics:

• Execute sync commands
• FFmpegSession for each sync/async call
• Execute async commands
• Get media information for a file
• Stop ongoing FFmpeg operations

Step 3

Understand ffmpeg commands in more detail. If this is your first time you will want to read up on documentation or visit stackoverflow posts.

Useful links for getting started:

• Complete list of arguments that’s outputted by running ffmpeg -h full
• ffmpeg Documentation
• Converting video files to different formats
• Convert Images to a Video Sequence

Step 4

Build something cool!

• Give this post a clap or leave a comment.
• If there’s enough interest, I’ll follow up with exactly how I built my feature for taking a list of image links, downloading them in separate threads, then using FFmpeg to combine them into a video slideshow.