<< Mods, diagrams, howtos etc

High quality still image for Youtube uploads

using a simple FFmpeg prompt

Let's say you don't want to deal with digital music distribution services but want your tracks to be up on Youtube or other video platforms as a streaming/embedding option, so you'd prefer creating a channel and uploading your music manually. Totally valid, as far as I'm concerned.

Creative control over what you use as a picture for that video is a nice thing that comes with this method too. Regardless of what you decide to put there (augmented/expanded cover art with notes, your band photo, or some unrelated but aesthetically fitting thing), it's probably going to be a static image, unless we're talking about a lyric video, algorithmic visualization, or some short loop lifted from classic anime.

So here's how to make a "still video" with just the audio track and an image file as source input, bypassing any cumbersome video editors, shady online converters, resolution (or aspect ratio) limitations, audio recompression, and with a perfectly crisp full-resolution still picture that wouldn't break down into drifting blocks when you seek back and forth in the video player (and also healthily compact in terms of file size):

  1. Prepare the image (1920x1080 is the safest bet resolutionwise but you can go virtually anywhere from subversive ultra-low-res to any sort of who-knows-how-many-K UHD, depending on the video platform limitations as of when you're reading this), preferably in the maximum quality JPEG or PNG format;
  2. Get FFmpeg if you still haven't;
  3. Place ffmpeg.exe in the same directory as your source audio track and image;
  4. Run the following command:

    ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -i track.mp3 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 18 -tune stillimage -c:a copy -shortest output.mkv

    (don't forget to rename the generic image.jpg and track.mp3 to your actual source file names in the prompt but avoid using spaces in those filenames);
  5. The processing itself takes mere seconds, and output.mkv is your uploadable video (you can also change the output filename in the prompt to avoid confusion when working on multiple tracks).

That's it.

Cheers,
G

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