Version 2.0 (Beta) · ffmpegcommander.com
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Welcome to Rays FFmpeg Commander Toolbox.
This is two tools in one. It is a video toolbox for converting, downloading, transcribing, and cleaning up your media, and it is a video editing tool for cutting, trimming, previewing, and assembling clips. You do not need one app for the boring jobs and a second app for the creative ones. It is all here in a single window.
Under the hood it runs on FFmpeg, the same engine that professional video software and streaming platforms rely on. FFmpeg is powerful, but it normally lives on the command line, where every job means typing a long line of flags and hoping you got them right. This toolbox puts a real graphical interface on top of it. You click buttons, pick your files, choose your settings from menus, and watch a live progress bar. No commands to memorize, no syntax to get wrong.
Everything runs locally on your own computer. Your files never leave your machine, nothing is uploaded to a cloud service, and there is no account to sign into. When you convert a video or pull a transcript, the work happens right there on your own hardware. That keeps your media private and it keeps the tool fast.
The toolbox runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Here is the short version of what the tool covers. Each of these has its own chapter later in the manual.
The chapters follow roughly the order you would meet the tool for the first time. We start with choosing your media, move through the editing tools, then cover downloading, network conversion, transcription, the filmic look, and encoding, which gets a chapter of its own because it is where most of the real work gets done. The last few chapters cover the Log and the dependency check.
You do not have to read it front to back. Jump to the chapter for the job in front of you. Each one stands on its own.
Let's get started.
Before you can convert or edit anything, the tool needs to know two things: which video files you are working on, and where finished files should be saved. That is what the two buttons at the top do.
Click "Choose Media..." and a small menu asks what you want to add. You have several ways to bring video in:
You can pick more than one file, and the files you choose become the batch the rest of the tool works on.
Click "Set output folder" and choose the folder where your finished files should be written. Whatever you pick here is also used as the download folder for the yt-dlp downloader, so you only have to set it once.
One tip the tool will remind you about on a Mac: avoid sending output to your Desktop or into iCloud Drive. Those locations make macOS index, generate thumbnails, and upload every file as it is written, which can noticeably slow down large video jobs. Your Movies or Downloads folder is a safer, faster choice.
This is the video-editing side of the toolbox. There are four tools here, and they are meant to work together: trim a clip, stash the good pieces, preview your framing, and assemble a finished cut. You do not need all four for every job. For a simple trim, Quick Edit alone is enough.
This is the fastest way to cut a video down. Click "Quick Edit (Keep, Remove, Cut)..." after selecting a file and you get a small dialog with three choices.
You also choose how precise the cut is:
Start and End times are flexible. You can type plain seconds (5), a minutes-and-seconds form (1:30), or a full hours:minutes:seconds.ms form (00:01:23.500). When you open the dialog it fills in the full length of the clip for you as a starting point.
The Holding Bin is where cut clips live, and the Timeline is where you put them in order to build a finished video. Send segments here from Quick Edit's "Cut to Holding Bin" mode or from the Directors Chair Player, then arrange them into the sequence you want.
This is where the Holding Bin becomes a real little editor rather than just a shelf for clips. There are several layers of creative control: per-clip look and speed effects, a whole library of frei0r plugin effects, transitions between clips, and cinematic text.
When you are happy with the arrangement, "Preview Timeline" plays back the whole assembled piece, complete with your transitions and effects, and "Export Timeline" renders it into a single finished video.
The Directors Chair Player is a preview player built for framing and review, not just playback. One important thing to understand about it: it is dynamic. It changes what it shows you depending on how you opened it. Playing a plain video gives you a clean framing view. Opening a clip from the Holding Bin, or previewing effects from the Director Workbench, unlocks extra panels for adjusting that clip.
You can also set Start and End markers while you watch, then send the marked segment straight to the Holding Bin, which makes it easy to pick your cut points visually rather than by typing times.
You adjust these while you watch and hear the result, then keep them as part of that clip.
The Director Workbench is a more experimental, cinematic workspace, and it is where the tool leans hardest into the "look" of your footage.
Its starting point is "Scan Composition", which samples frames from your clip and analyzes them against the rule of thirds to score how well your shots are composed. Based on that scan it produces Alt Cut Recommendations: alternate framing and cut ideas.
The real power, though, is the effects. Each one can be previewed, adjusted with its own controls, and rendered, and you can stack several together into one combined pass. Here is the full set:
These Workbench effects do not live only inside the Workbench. They carry over into the Directors Chair Player as effect regions on the timeline, where you can see exactly where each look applies and fine- tune it against the live picture. That is the payoff of the dynamic player described above: the Workbench decides the looks, and the Player is where you sit and adjust them.
A "HOW THIS WORKS?" button inside the Workbench explains the composition analysis in more detail whenever you want it.
The "Download from URL (yt-dlp)" button lets you pull video down from the web for your own use. It is powered by yt-dlp, a well-known downloading engine, wrapped in a simple dialog so you do not have to touch a command line.
One honest note on what works: as long as the video source is not copy-protected (DRM), you should generally be able to download it. There are no guarantees, since sites change how they serve video from time to time, but ordinary unprotected sources usually download fine.
The dialog has two tabs: Quick Setup and Advanced. Most of the time Quick Setup is all you need.
There is also a "What can this Download?" button if you are curious what kinds of sites and links are supported, and a Recent downloads list for the current session. Presets let you save a setup you use often. When you are ready, the button at the bottom reads "Download".
The Advanced tab is there for the occasional stubborn link. It lets you enter a Custom format string, pick which YouTube client to use (Auto, Web, Android, or iOS), and choose whether to use cookies from your browser or a cookies file. You can leave all of these on their Auto defaults unless a download is not behaving.
This feature is for video that lives on a network share rather than on your own computer, for example a movie on a NAS or media server that an older TV cannot play because of its codec. It lets you convert that file and put the converted version back in place, safely, without ever touching the original until you say so.
Click "Network Codec Convert & Replace" to open it.
The whole design is deliberately cautious. The original is never overwritten silently; you are always the one who decides.
If you have many files to convert, use "Choose Folder..." instead of picking one file. The tool scans the folder for videos and converts every one, automatically replacing each original with its converted version while keeping a .bak backup of each. If a file fails, it is skipped and the batch keeps going, and you get a summary at the end.
If the folder contains subfolders with videos in them, the tool asks whether you want to convert just that one folder or include the subfolders too. After a batch, "Delete All Backups" clears every .bak at once.
The toolbox can listen to a video and write out subtitles for you automatically, and it can also take a subtitle file you have cleaned up by hand and burn it permanently into a video. Those are the two halves of this chapter.
Click "Transcribe (Whisper)" with a file selected. This uses Whisper, a speech-to-text engine, to turn the spoken audio into subtitles. It all runs on your own machine. As it works, a live transcript scrolls in a panel on the right so you can watch it come together.
The main settings:
Lenient keeps nearly everything and is best for clean recordings like podcasts or interviews. Balanced is the default and works well for most content. Strict removes more and is recommended for films or any content with a music bed or significant background noise. Very Strict is the most aggressive and is useful when heavy audio still leaves phantom subtitles after a Strict pass.
These settings are saved with your presets, so you can create a "Films" preset with Strict enabled and switch to it in one click.
Auto lets the reading-speed algorithm decide, which is fine for normal pacing. For fast dialogue or translated foreign films — where the translated English line is often longer than the original spoken words — setting this to 1.5 s or 2.0 s gives viewers comfortable reading time without subtitles overlapping each other.
The .SRT is saved next to your source video automatically, and an "Export .SRT..." button lets you save a copy anywhere you like.
Auto-generated subtitles are rarely perfect. You will often want to fix a misheard word, tidy up the wording, or remove the occasional line the engine invented. Once you have hand-corrected the .SRT in any text editor, use "Burn Edited .SRT" to lay your polished subtitles into the video.
It walks you through three steps:
Click "Burn" and the tool produces a finished video with your corrected subtitles baked in, saved with an "_edited_subs" name so your original is left alone.
The toolbox has a dedicated black-and-white mode for giving footage a classic film look, rather than a flat, lifeless grayscale. Turning on the "B&W (Filmic)" checkbox produces deep, rich black and white with a gentle contrast curve and a subtle grain applied to the brightness only, which is what gives real film its texture.
Before you commit, click "B&W Filmic/Artistic PREVIEW" for a quick 15-second live preview of the look on your clip. (The live preview is available on Mac and Linux.)
The filmic mode can emulate a range of real black-and-white film stocks, each with its own character:
Pick the stock whose mood fits your footage, preview it, and then convert as usual to bake the look in.
Encoding is the heart of the tool. It is where you decide the format, quality, and size of your finished video, and it takes up a large part of the main window for good reason. This chapter walks through the settings in the Encoding panel. If you ever want more room on screen, the panel collapses with the "Hide Encoding Settings" button and opens again with "Show Encoding Settings".
Most of the time you can leave these on their defaults and just press Convert. The controls are here for when you need them.
The file wrapper for your output: mp4, mkv, mov, or avi. mp4 is the safe, universally compatible choice.
This is the codec that actually compresses your video. The list covers both software (CPU) and hardware-accelerated options:
If you are not sure, H.264 (libx264) is the reliable default.
The speed-versus-quality trade-off for the x264, x265, and NVENC encoders, running from ultrafast to placebo. Slower presets squeeze the file smaller at the same quality; faster presets finish sooner. The default, medium, is a good balance.
A slider from 0 to 51 where lower means higher quality and a larger file. The default of 23 is a sensible middle ground. Drop it toward 18 for near-transparent quality, or raise it if you want smaller files and can accept a little softness.
For the NVENC encoders you can choose the rate-control method, VBR or CBR. Separately, you can set a target Bitrate in kbps. Leave the bitrate at 0 to let the Quality slider drive the result, which is the usual way to work.
There is also a "Spatial AQ" option that applies to the NVENC encoders.
Choose the audio encoder for your output: AAC, MP3, Opus, or AC-3. AAC is the standard choice for mp4.
A few optional audio tools are available:
A watermark toggle sits just above the Convert button if you want to stamp your output.
When your settings are set, "Convert" processes your files one after another. "Parallel Convert" works through several at once, which is faster on a capable machine when you have a batch to get through. A progress bar keeps you posted, and "Open output folder" takes you straight to the finished files.
Along the bottom of the main window is the Log. It is a running, plain-text record of what the tool is doing: the files you selected, the edits you set, conversion progress, and any warnings or errors. If something does not go the way you expected, the Log is the first place to look, because it usually says exactly what happened.
You do not have to do anything to use it; it fills in as you work. A small row of buttons sits above it:
The toolbox leans on a handful of outside tools to do its work — chief among them FFmpeg, the engine behind everything. Most of these come bundled and just work, but the "Dependency check" button lets you confirm everything is present and, when something is missing, tells you how to get it.
The button itself doubles as a quiet status light: hover over it and it will tell you either that all known dependencies were detected, or which ones are missing.
Click it to open the full report. For each component you see whether it was found (and often its version) or is missing, along with a short note on what it is for. The components it checks include:
Where something is missing or out of date, the report gives you a ready-to-run command to install or update it, so you are never left guessing. For yt-dlp in particular you can choose between the latest stable release and the newest nightly build.
Most people never need to open this. It is here for the moments when a feature is not behaving and you want a quick, honest answer about whether a piece is missing.
Thank you for reading this far. If you have gone through the manual and still have a question, or you run into something that does not work the way you expected, please get in touch. I would rather hear from you than have you stuck.
Technical support is free for one year. Whether it is a how-to question, a bug, or a request for a feature you wish the tool had, send it my way and I will help.
Get in touch: https://ffmpegcommander.com/contact.html
A quick tip that makes support faster: if the tool did something unexpected, open the Log (Chapter 9), click Copy, and paste it into your message. That usually tells me exactly what happened and saves us a round of back-and-forth.
Thanks again for using the toolbox.
– Ray
End of manual.
FFmpeg Commander Video Toolbox — 2026