Working with multimedia

The command-line is not just about text – you can work with multimedia in the terminal too. Whether batch processing images, audio, or video, or listening to music, even watching videos, a surprising amount can be done directly in the console.

Basic multimedia editing and conversion tools:

• Images: imagemagick (which provides the versatile convert command)
• Video: ffmpeg for converting, editing, and extracting video
• Audio: sox (the “Swiss Army Knife of audio processing programs)

For playing back multimedia there are a large number of options depending on your preferences, for example:

• mplayer basic command for playing movies and audio
• mocp or moc an interactive visual console-based audio player
• mpv a command line video player
• cmus a small and fast console music player