Instead of cropping and re-encoding, consider cropping upon playback. See FFmpeg Wiki: H.264 Video Encoding Guide for more info. Notesĭefault encoder for MP4 is libx264 (H.264 video) or mpeg4 (MPEG-4 Part 2 video) depending on your ffmpeg build.

This way you can experiment and adjust your cropping without the need to encode, view, repeat. You can take a crop (heh heh) and preview it live with ffplay: ffplay -i input -vf 'crop=in_w:in_h-40'

The filter will automatically center the crop if x and y are omitted such as in this example.

The output width and height can also be used with out_w and out_h.Ĭrop 20 pixels from the top, and 20 from the bottom: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v 'crop=in_w:in_h-40' -c:a copy out.mp4

You can refer to the input image size with in_w and in_h as shown in this first example.

To crop the bottom right quarter: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v 'crop=in_w/2:in_h/2:in_w/2:in_h/2' -c:a copy out.mp4

The audio is stream copied in this example, so re-encoding is avoided.

x and y specify the top left corner of the output rectangle.

out_h is the height of the output rectangle.

out_w is the width of the output rectangle.

In recent versions of FFmpeg, use the crop filter: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v 'crop=out_w:out_h:x:y' out.mp4 Many thanks to slhck, Jonathan., Anton Rudeshko, LordNeckbeard and future maintainers.

Note: The original answer was posted in this link: How can I crop a video with ffmpeg? which originally posted by me and edited several times in order to update it to the newest options in the most recent versions of ffmpeg. Something like this should work with the proper parameters for each case:

Ffmpeg resize crop