Is it possible to use ffmpeg to trim off X seconds from the beginning of a video with an unspecified length?

Question

I need to trim the just the first 1 or 2 seconds off of a series of FLV recordings of varying, unspecified lengths. I've found plenty of resources for extracting a specified duration from a video (e.g. 30 second clips), but none for continuing to the end of a video.

Both of these attempts just yield a copied version of the video, sans desired trimming:

ffmpeg -ss 2 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i input.flv output.flv

ffmpeg -ss 2 -t 120 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i input.flv output.flv

The thought on the second one was: perhaps if I specified a length beyond what was possible, it'd just go to the end. No dice.

I know it's not an issue with codecs or using seconds instead of timecode since the following worked a charm:

ffmpeg -ss 2 -t 5 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i input.flv output.flv

Any other ideas? I'm open to using other (Windows-based) command line tools, however am strongly favoring ffmpeg since I'm already using it for thumbnail creation and am familiar with it.

If it helps, my videos will all be under 2 minutes.

UPDATE:

I've switched over to using Mencoder (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/) since it looks like ffmpeg won't accomplish this without some additional hackery.

The Mencoder syntax to accomplish what I set out to do is:

mencoder.exe -ss 2 -oac copy -ovc copy input.flv -o output.flv

Answer 1

Looks like you'll have to do the math yourself. ffmpeg has some features for getting the length of a video stream. You may have to write a script to parse the output and read the stream length, then use it to extract the desired portion.

Answer 2

Turns out this command will trim the video from 2 seconds on, as expected:

ffmpeg -ss 2 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i input.flv output.flv

The issue was with the keyframe interval in input.flv. It was set to 5 seconds, which yielded 3 seconds worth of black frames at the beginning of the video (5 - 2 = 3). I've since changed my keyframe interval to 1 second, though 2 seconds would probably also yield the desired results in my case.

Answer 3

Try:

ffmpeg -i input.flv -ss 2 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.flv

I think the input parameter is supposed to be first.