avconv -i input.mp4 -f wav - | avconv -i -i input.mp4 -map 1 -map_metadata 0 -c copy output.mp4 Unfortunately, the only way I can think of to do this used a pipe and two avconv processes.
This works because most of the time, the data streams have no meaningful metadata written to them however, sometimes they do, and you want to completely get rid of that metadata. This will take the metadata from the first data stream (normally the video stream) and use that to replace the global metadata of the container file. avconv -i input.mp4 -map 0 -map_metadata 0:s:0 -c copy output.mp4 NOTE: I'm using avconv, because that's in the Ubuntu 12.04 repositories this will probably be drop-in compatible with ffmpeg, since their syntax always is in my experience. The easiest way to do this is to set -map_metadata to use one of the input streams, rather than using global metadata. I'm leaving this here for anyone using an outdated version.
I recommend solution because it's less typing and up to date. NOTE: I have since updated ffmpeg (previously I had the outdated version of avconv from the Ubuntu repositories).
