8 FFmpeg Recipes I Use Every Week (That Most Developers Don't Know Exist)

I've been using FFmpeg almost every day for the past year. Mostly for boring real work: cutting Shorts, cleaning voice tracks, exporting web versions, generating thumbnails, and fixing weird media issues at the last minute when something breaks five minutes before publish. Most FFmpeg tutorials cover the basics and stop there. These are the commands I actually come back to in production. Here are 8 recipes I use constantly. Copy-paste ready. 1. Extract Audio from Video (and Clean It Up) # Extract audio only ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -acodec libmp3lame -q :a 2 audio.mp3 # Extract + normalize loudness to broadcast standard ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -af "loudnorm=I=-16:TP=-1.5:LRA=11" -ar 44100 clean_audio.mp3 When I use it: Podcast edits, voiceover cleanup, and those annoying cases where a track sounds fine in headphones but way too quiet after upload. The loudnorm filter saved me from re-exporting more than once. 2. Create a GIF from a Video Clip (That Doesn't Look Terrible) Most GIF conver