Fast and dirty favicon
We’ve all been there. We need a favicon for our new shiny website, but its in the wrong bloody format.
Legends across the internet have spoken of a tool. A single tool so mighty, it can handle any image, video or audio manipulation any young squire could possibly dream up.
That tool… is ffmpeg.
If you don’t know, its well worth getting to know. This guy is the OG.
So luckily for us the task at hand is about as simple as it gets with ffmpeg
I have a jpeg file. Its a beautiful image of me.
Lovely.
Now favicons can be pretty much any file format, here’s a chart for reference, but not all image formats are created equally.
For the purposes of this article, I have arbritrarily decided that the format for my favicon should be png.
Now ffmpeg is clever. You can give it an input file, and specify an output file name and it will automagically turn your image from one format to the other.
ffmpeg -i ./me.jpeg ./favicon.png
Here we say “oi, ffmpeg do us a favour and take this input file (-i for input file/stream followed by the path to the file) and output me a ./favicon.png”
And in a flash ffmpeg does the deed.
Nice one ffmpeg