[FFmpeg-user] Large Sized output files recieved while encoding the audio

[Carl Zwanzig]

On 4/21/2022 8:38 AM, Shubham Tiwari wrote:
> Does ffmpeg always convert the audio file while running the filter? if not,
> in what cases does it skip the conversion?

Most (all?) filters must operate on uncompressed data, so it depends 
entirely on what filters are being used-

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#Detailed-description tells us:
"ffmpeg calls the libavformat library [...] to read input files and get 
packets containing encoded data from them. [...]

Encoded packets are then passed to the decoder (unless streamcopy is 
selected for the stream, see further for a description). The decoder 
produces uncompressed frames (raw video/PCM audio/...) which can be 
processed further by filtering (see next section). After filtering, the 
frames are passed to the encoder, which encodes them and outputs encoded 
packets. Finally those are passed to the muxer, which writes the encoded 
packets to the output file."


If you are converting from one encoding to another (e.g. opus to mp3), the 
data must be decoded/uncompressed in order to re-encode to the other.

If a filter makes any change to the raw data (like adjusting the volume 
level), the data must be decoded/filtered/re-encoded so the filter can 
modify it.


Remember that -container- and -encoding- are different things; as shown, a 
wav container is holding opus encoding but usually it holds PCM/un-encoded 
audio. A Matruska container (mkv/mka) can hold a lot of different encodings. 
It's possible to copy an encoded stream between compatible containers, but 
that's an exact -copy-.


All of this is in the existing ffmpeg documentation.

z!