When I started out at Movideo, our platform only supports 16:9 and 4:3 videos. As Movideo grows, I realized that the bigger studios doesn’t necessarily deals with 16:9 and 4:3 anymore. Obviously, resizing a mezzanine video with the -s command doesn’t work anymore because you might end up with stretchy videos.
A few weeks back I’ve been tasked to make some changes so that FFmpeg will scale the video based on height. For example, if a video is 640x360, and the given height to encode is 720, the output video should be 1280x720.
After doing some research, I found a StackOverflow post with the solution. The answer was to use FFmpeg’s video filter -vf scale=-1:360. That only works when the scaled width is an even number. If the scaled width is an odd number, you’ll get the following error height not divisible by 2.
The same post also states that to scale the height based on the width, you’ll need to do scale=640:trunc(ow/a/2)*2 to prevent the height not divisible by 2 error. So if you need to scale by height, the command would be
-vf scale=trunc(oh*a/2)*2:720
Unfortunately, we’re also using FFmpeg to do watermarking on videos and you cannot have 2 video filter command in FFmpeg. Luckily, you can merge both the video filter command into one video filter command by doing the following:
-vf "movie=watermark.png [watermark]; [in][watermark] overlay=10:main_h-overlay_h-10 scale=trunc(oh*a/2)*2:720 [out]"