Each codec has its own properties, strengths, and weaknesses. The streams include the actual AV components, such as a movie's audio or video, and are encoded using a particular media encoding, or codec. Media filesĪt a very high-level view, a media file is broken up into a container and its streams.

Before we look at using FFmpeg, first we need to take a quick look at what a media file exactly is. In this article, we are interested in using it to convert files, so we won't be taking a deep dive into its entire feature set. It can be downloaded from the FFmpeg website or through most package managers.įFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. It's available on many different operating systems and is included in some operating systems by default. In this article I'll be using FFmpeg through the command-line tool ffmpeg, which is only a single, small piece of the FFmpeg project. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the Moving Picture Experts Group or the myriad multimedia formats it has created. It's often used behind the scenes in many other media-related projects. Enter FFmpeg.įFmpeg is a collection of different projects for handling multimedia files. Tools like Audacity or Handbrake are fantastic, but sometimes you just want to change a file from one format into another quickly.

There are many open source tools out there for editing, tweaking, and converting multimedia into exactly what you need.

Drag the Quality slider to the desired level (keep an eye on the file size).

Click the Options button in the Export window.

Choose a location to export your converted images.

Select File -> Export Selected Images.

Select Edit -> Select All from the Preview menu bar, or use the Command-A keyboard shortcut to select all the open images.

(if it's not showing, click the View Menu button and select Thumbnails.) Alternatively, if you're using the Contact Sheet view, drag a box over all the images to select them. If Preview isn't your default image viewer, right-click (Ctrl-click) instead and choose Open With -> Preview from the dropdown menu.

Double-click one of the selected images to open them all in Preview.In a Finder window, hold down the Command (⌘) key and individually click all the images you want to convert if they're grouped together consecutively, hold down Shift and click the first and then the last file, and all of them will be selected.The secret to accessing all of the available format export options in Preview is with the Option (⌥) key.

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