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short-form-ffmpeg-cookbook

Short-form FFmpeg cookbook: copyable commands for Reels. Turns raw footage into a 1080×1920 9:16 MP4 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts with burned-in captions (SRT or ASS), trims and joins clips, and lays music under the voice with ducking. Every command was run on test media. Free and local; works in Claude Code, Codex and Grok, or on the varg ffmpeg tool (credits) when the agent has no shell. Use when the user wants to crop to vertical, burn subtitles, cut or join clips, or add background music with FFmpeg. NOT for animated word-by-word captions (use Remotion or HyperFrames caption skills) or for choosing an editing service (use varg-video-editing).

plugins/vargHQ/skills/short-form-ffmpeg-cookbook/SKILL.md

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Nov 6, 2026
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Apache-2.0

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# Short-form FFmpeg cookbook: copyable commands for Reels

Input: a video (any size), optionally an SRT file and a music track. Output: a 1080×1920 9:16 MP4 ready for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Probe first, run one recipe at a time, check the result with ffprobe and a frame grab before the next step.

```bash
ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=codec_type,codec_name,width,height,r_frame_rate -show_entries format=duration -of compact=p=0 input.mp4
```

## 1. Crop to 9:16 vertical

```bash
# center crop, full height
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=ih*9/16:ih,scale=1080:1920,setsar=1" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a copy vertical.mp4
# subject off-center: add the x offset in px