How To Write A For Loop?

PowerShell Help
1

Dumb baby question I know. Sorry. Please direct me to the right place if you’re offended. But I’ve been looking everywhere and getting heaps of hits and trying them and they don’t work.

I just want to run ffmpeg on a dir full of mkv files and change them to mp4.

The original clue I got was something like t his:

for i in *.mkv do ffmpeg -i "$i" -strict experimental -codec copy "${i%.*}.mp4"
rem done

But it doesn’t work and none of the many variations I’ve come across and tried do either. Truly it has been 20 years since I wrote a DOS batch file and I’ve done very little coding of any kind in that time. So I beg your indulgence.

:slight_smile:

 

 

2

What you want is the about_For documentation page from Microsoft. The syntax looks like this:

for ($i=0; $i -eq 10; $i++) { <command> }

which will iterate a for loop starting at i=0 until i=10 adding 1 to i each iteration.

But, for your usage, you might want to use foreach instead.

3

I agree with grokkit, you’d want to use the `foreach` statement.

You can use `Get-ChildItem` to get all .m4v files, loop through them, and export an mp4 for each one using the `ffmpeg` command:

# Restrict to files that are .m4v
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path somepath -Filter *.m4v -File

foreach ($file in $files) {

    $fileFullName = $file.FullName
    # Use same name for output file with .mp4 extension
    $exportPath = $fileFullName -replace '.m4v$', '.mp4'

    ffmpeg -i $fileFullName -strict experimental -codec copy $exportPath

    Write-Output "done"
}

Edit: Adjusted by adding $fileFullName.