FFmpeg: how to produce MP4 CENC (Common Encryption) videos

Question

What is the correct syntax to do CENC encryption with ffmpeg?

The ffmpeg 3.0 release notes include "Common Encryption (CENC) MP4 encoding and decoding support", and the files libavformat/movenccenc.h and libavformat/movenccenc.c seem to include everything needed to encrypt MP4 files according to the Common Encryption standard.

However, I can't find any documentation on this topic in the ffmpeg manual pages.

Regards

Answer 1

Mulvya's answer covered the ffmpeg-options.

I'm just adding a concrete example and talk about playback too, as i did some experiments yesterday (independently).

Encryption example

ffmpeg -i SampleVideo_1280x720_1mb.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -encryption_scheme cenc-aes-ctr -encryption_key 76a6c65c5ea762046bd749a2e632ccbb -encryption_kid a7e61c373e219033c21091fa607bf3b8 SampleVideo_1280x720_1mb_encrypted.mp4

(of course usage might be different for your case; i just remuxed video and audio)

Playback / Decoding

ffplay

ffplay SampleVideo_1280x720_1mb_encrypted.mp4 -decryption_key 76a6c65c5ea762046bd749a2e632ccbb

But as this is more or less a prototype-player, one might want to use something more powerful.

mpv

mpv --demuxer-lavf-o=decryption_key=76a6c65c5ea762046bd749a2e632ccbb SampleVideo_1280x720_1mb_encrypted.mp4

There is some discussion here as my first expected command-line did not behave as expected!

Edit: trying to address Reino's questions

The encryption_key is just 128 bit = 16 bytes encoded as Hex (following the usage of AES-128-CTR). So random.org with a configuration of 16 bytes and hex.encoding would be a valid key (but i'm not recommending to trust external resources in general). I used python's secrets module which boils down to: secrets.token_hex(16). This encryption_key will be needed for decoding.

The encryption_kid Key ID is just an identifier for this key, probably needed for more complex usage-patterns (i'm !guessing! you could do something like: hey video... which of my 1000 keys do i need for you?). I suppose it's mandatory to pass it, but it's not required for decoding (if you know which key to use for which video).

The official references would be:

• Standard
• ffmpeg implementation: docs (available through command-line) or a short extraction