Creating video with audio and still image for YouTube

Question

I'm running the following command:

ffmpeg -i audio.mp3 -ar 44100 -f image2 -i logo.jpg -r 15 -b 1800 -s 640x480 foo.mov

Which successfully outputs a video with my recorded audio and an image on it.

When I try and upload this to YouTube it fails to process, regardless of the formats I try: .mov, .avi, .flv, .mp4

Is there some setting I'm missing in the above that would generate a format Youtube will accept? I've tried looking through the ffmpeg documentation but I'm in over my head.

I did an experiment by putting a 2 second video with a 30 second mp3. When I uploaded to youtube, the resulting video was only 2 seconds long. So it may be that YouTube looks only to the video track for the length, and since a picture is only a frame long or whatever, maybe that borks it.

Answer 1

Here's what worked:

ffmpeg -i audio.mp3 -f image2 -loop 1 -i logo.jpg 
-r 15 -s 640x480 \
-c:v libx264 -crf 18 -tune stillimage -preset medium \
-shortest foo.mov

Specifically, the loop option, which will duplicate the image as frames. It will also then need the shortest option to keep the file from growing and growing (this way it truncates it to the length of the shortest stream – here, the audio file).

The r option changes the frame rate, and crf 18 sets the quality (use a higher value here for lower video quality). See here for more details: FFmpeg: The ultimate Video and Audio Manipulation Tool

Answer 2

A piece of code that works for me, from another forum:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -r ntsc -i image.jpg -i song.mp3 -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -preset fast -threads 0 -shortest output.mkv 

Answer 3

I took Pavel's code, that worked for me too, and shortened it by trimming needless options:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -shortest -i <audio file> -i <image file> <output video file>

this is a general form that works with any image and audio file as input and produce a video file as output.

That said, since your video stream will be made of a single picture repeated indefinitely, you could set a low frame rate (that is the number of images that appears in a second) with -r. Note that not all output containers allow low frame rates. One that does is avi, so you might do:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -shortest -r 0.1 -i <audio file> -i <image file> output.avi

this would create a video file with a frame rate of 0.1 (i.e. one image each 10 seconds) instead of the default of 25. This will affect file size but not video quality. Eventually, you can set the audio bitrate to get a better audio quality with -ab. This is the command I actually use to make this kind of videos for youtube:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -shortest -r 0.1 -i <audio file> -i <image file> -ab 128k output.avi

Answer 4

with avconv:

avconv -i input.mp3 -loop 1 -f image2 -i logo.png -r 30 -s 640x480 -ab 128k -ar 44100 -ac 1 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 01:02:03.123 foo.ogv

Answer 5

To add something a little shorter, this worked for me:

ffmpeg -i audio.wav -loop 1 -i image.png -shortest foo.flv

The order of options is important.

Answer 6

I got this to work after much experimentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlDT819Q3s

1. Convert image(s) to video as per https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create%20a%20video%20slideshow%20from%20images:

   ffmpeg -framerate 1/20 -i png/img-%03d.png -c:v libx264 -vf "fps=25,format=yuv420p" png.mp4

   Here I use several images and make them change every 20s.

2. Concatenate enough copies of the above video to span the duration of your audio as per https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate. Other solutions, like expecting ffmpeg -i wav.wav -i png.mp4 youtube.mp4 to do the right thing, ended up being rejected by YouTube (also, players such as VLC are confused and cannot seek properly). My guess is that time positions need to be adjusted in the copies, which ffmpeg does not do, unless they are concatenated:

   ffmpeg -f concat -i pngs.txt -c copy pngs.mp4

   (where the file pngs.txt is hand-made to contain as many copies as needed: copies = audio length / video length)

3. Mix your audio with the video obtained in 2 as per https://www.virag.si/2015/06/encoding-videos-for-youtube-with-ffmpeg/:

   ffmpeg -i pngs.mp4 -i wav.wav -shortest -codec:v libx264 -crf 21 -bf 2 -flags +cgop -pix_fmt yuv420p -codec:a aac -strict -2 -b:a 384k -r:a 48000 -movflags faststart youtube.mp4

Now the file youtube.mp4 should be accepted by YT.