Description

The sub-sections that follow describe the various rules that are involved in stream selection. The examples that follow next show how these rules are applied in practice.

While every effort is made to accurately reflect the behavior of the program, FFmpeg is under continuous development and the code may have changed since the time of this writing.

Automatic stream selection

In the absence of any map options for a particular output file, ffmpeg inspects the output format to check which type of streams can be included in it, viz. video, audio and/or subtitles. For each acceptable stream type, ffmpeg will pick one stream, when available, from among all the inputs.

It will select that stream based upon the following criteria:

• for video, it is the stream with the highest resolution,
• for audio, it is the stream with the most channels,
• for subtitles, it is the first subtitle stream found but there's a caveat. The output format's default subtitle encoder can be either text-based or image-based, and only a subtitle stream of the same type will be chosen.

In the case where several streams of the same type rate equally, the stream with the lowest index is chosen.

Data or attachment streams are not automatically selected and can only be included using -map.

Manual stream selection

When -map is used, only user-mapped streams are included in that output file, with one possible exception for filtergraph outputs described below.

Complex filtergraphs

If there are any complex filtergraph output streams with unlabeled pads, they will be added to the first output file. This will lead to a fatal error if the stream type is not supported by the output format. In the absence of the map option, the inclusion of these streams leads to the automatic stream selection of their types being skipped. If map options are present, these filtergraph streams are included in addition to the mapped streams.

Complex filtergraph output streams with labeled pads must be mapped once and exactly once.

Stream handling

Stream handling is independent of stream selection, with an exception for subtitles described below. Stream handling is set via the -codec option addressed to streams within a specific output file. In particular, codec options are applied by ffmpeg after the stream selection process and thus do not influence the latter. If no -codec option is specified for a stream type, ffmpeg will select the default encoder registered by the output file muxer.

An exception exists for subtitles. If a subtitle encoder is specified for an output file, the first subtitle stream found of any type, text or image, will be included. ffmpeg does not validate if the specified encoder can convert the selected stream or if the converted stream is acceptable within the output format. This applies generally as well: when the user sets an encoder manually, the stream selection process cannot check if the encoded stream can be muxed into the output file. If it cannot, ffmpeg will abort and all output files will fail to be processed.