Way back in Dec 2015, @maxogden wrote a nice guide on stabilizing your own video with ffmpeg. I return to it on occasion and have updated my gist comment to offer some updated commands. Since enough has changed regarding installation and use, I figure a new, spiffy, and working guide deserves a non-gist home.

Presenting the 2021-era guide to pretty easy DIY video stabilization!

On Mac OS, install ffmpeg and vidstab from homebrew:

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brew install ffmpeg
brew install libvidstab

On linux, you can sudo make install.

Run stabilization in two passes

There are plenty of options for libvidstab, like shakiness, accuracy, smoothing. The defaults are good, but you may want to experiment. There’s even a visual diagnostic mode.

Assuming the source video is named clip.mkv…

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# The first pass ('detect') generates stabilization data and saves to `transforms.trf`
# The `-f null -` tells ffmpeg there's no output video file
ffmpeg -i clip.mkv -vf vidstabdetect -f null -

# The second pass ('transform') uses the .trf and creates the new stabilized video.
ffmpeg -i clip.mkv -vf vidstabtransform clip-stabilized.mkv

You now have a clip-stabilized.mkv!

Bonus: create a comparison video

Use the vstack or hstack filter, depending on if you want them stacked vertically or side-by-side:

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# vertically stacked
ffmpeg -i clip.mkv -i clip-stabilized.mkv  -filter_complex vstack clips-stacked.mkv

# side-by-side
ffmpeg -i clip.mkv -i clip-stabilized.mkv  -filter_complex hstack clips-sxs.mkv

Double bonus: A two-liner that does everything (because repeating these filenames gets annoying)

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export vid="sourcevid.mkv"
ffmpeg -i "$vid" -vf vidstabdetect -f null -; ffmpeg -i "$vid" -vf vidstabtransform "$vid.stab.mkv"; ffmpeg -i "$vid" -i "$vid.stab.mkv"  -filter_complex vstack "$vid.stacked.mkv"