I wanted to convert an Flash Video (flv) file from YouTube to MP3. The first tip I found essentially streamed the original file into a different file:

ffmpeg -i filename.flv -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 -vn -y filename.mp3

This is a bit awkward, because not all flv files have the same quality (some are mono, for example). I don’t want to have to look up the number of channels (-ac 2 in the example) for each file that I need to convert.

Luckily, most flv files include an MP3 audio stream and ffmpeg can simply copy that stream to a new file:

ffmpeg -i filename.flv -acodec copy filename.mp3

This works perfectly and is much faster than the other method.