To set the stage, what these two tools are. FFMpeg is a popular open-source tool that can convert, transcode, and stream videos in various formats. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of video editing software it does everything!

VMAF (Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion) on the other hand is a perceptual quality assessment tool that can measure how good or bad your videos look to human eyes. It’s like having an expert video critic in your pocket!

Now, Let’s get started with some examples of how you can use these tools together to optimize your video quality metrics. First, let’s say that you have a video file called “myvideo.mp4” and you want to convert it to a different format using FFMpeg while maintaining the highest possible video quality. Here’s what you would do:

1. Open up your terminal or command prompt (depending on which operating system you are using) and navigate to the directory where “myvideo.mp4” is located.

2. Run this command: ffmpeg -i myvideo.mp4 -c:v libx265 -preset veryfast output_file.mkv

This will convert your video to a high-quality HEVC format using the “veryfast” preset, which is great for real-time encoding but may result in slightly lower quality compared to slower presets like “slow”.

3. Next, let’s say that you want to measure how good or bad your video looks using VMAF. You can do this by running the following command: vmaf -i output_file.mkv -o output_vmaf.txt

This will generate a text file called “output_vmaf.txt” which contains various metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF score.

4. Finally, let’s say that you want to optimize your video quality by adjusting the bitrate or other parameters using FFMpeg. You can do this by running a command like: ffmpeg -i myvideo.mp4 -c:v libx265 -preset veryfast -b:v 10M output_file.mkv

This will convert your video to a high-quality HEVC format using the “veryfast” preset and set the bitrate to 10 megabits per second (mbps). You can adjust this value based on your needs higher values result in better quality but also larger file sizes.

5. Once you have optimized your video using FFMpeg, let’s measure how good or bad it looks using VMAF again: vmaf -i output_file.mkv -o output_vmaf2.txt

This will generate a new text file called “output_vmaf2.txt” which contains the updated metrics. You can compare this to your original metrics and see if there is any improvement in video quality!