Making an audio slideshow with ffmpeg

2022-10-08

Inspired by a new trend of posting "playlists" on youtube with visual accompaniment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG92ss_2Vjw&t=1937s), I wanted to try to make my own with a slideshow. I used ffmpeg as the heavy lifting tool

#Step 1 - prepare your playlist

I like foobar2000, because it can combine multiple files into a single output file.

Use right-click -> "Convert ..." in the foobar2000 playlist

Use "Merge all tracks into one file" in the "Convert..." dialog

Note: If you have a folder of mp3's only, you can directly concatenate them with cat *.mp3 > out.mp3 or use ffmpeg to concatenate them for a pure command-line alternative.

#Step 2 - prepare the slideshow

Use 10 seconds per picture. Note the glob pattern is in quotes

ffmpeg -framerate 1/10 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' pics.mp4

#Step 3 - combine the slideshow and playlist

ffmpeg -stream_loop -1 -i pics.mp4 -i playlist.wav -shortest -vcodec copy output.mp4

Using -stream_loop -1 on pics.mp4 will loop the pics until playlist.wav ends, but then limit itself to the length of the playlist.wav with -shortest

#Step 4 - upload to youtube

Done!

#Footnote 1: What if you just want a single picture?

Common for posting an album to youtube, you post the album art and some audio, you can try searching from stackoverflow for options related to this

Example https://superuser.com/a/332867/415552

#Footnote 2: Distortion

The pictures may get distorted to fit the video frame, I haven't experimented with options that modify this behavior