Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg

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Extract audio and video (separation)

If for some reasons you want to separate the audio and the video from a file

you can use those commands:

ffmpeg -i input_file.flv -vn -acodec copy audio.aac

ffmpeg -i input_file.flv -an -vcodec copy video.mp4

Short explanation:

- `-vn` means `-video null` and so you discard video

- `-an` means `-audio null` and so you discard audio

- `codec copy` means the output is using original format from the file. If the

audio is mp3 then the output file will be a mp3 whatever the extension you

choose.

Instead of using codec copy you can choose a different codec for the extracted

file, but copy is a good choice, it performs really fast because you don't need

to re-encode it and is loss-less.

I use this to rework the audio with audacity.

Merge audio and video into a single file (merge)

After you reworked tracks (audio and/or video) of your file, you can combine

them into a single file.

ffmpeg -i input_audio.aac -i input_video.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f flv merged_video.flv