I've enjoyed using ffmpeg 1000% more since I was able to stop doing manually the tedious task of Googling for Stack Overflow answers and cobbling them into a command and got Chat GPT to write me commands instead.
I tried this (though with a different tool called aichat) for extremely simple stuff like just "convert this mov to mp4" and it generated overly complex commands that failed due to missing libraries. When I removed the "crap" from the commands, they worked.
So much like code assistance, they still need a fair amount of baby sitting. A good boost for experienced operators but might suck for beginners.
A while back I simply wrote my own bash function for this called `please`
as in
bash> please "use ffmpeg to extract audio from myfile.mov and save it as mp3"
It will then courteously show you the command it wants to run before you agree to do it.
Here is the whole thing, with its two dependent functions, so that people stop writing their own versions of this lol. All it needs is an OPENAI_API_KEY, feel free to modify for other LLMs
Suggestions welcome- for example I want to add a feature that either just copies it (for further modification) or prepopulates the command line with it somehow (possibly for further modification, or even for skipping the approval step)
>This will then be displayed in your terminal ready for you to edit it, or hit <enter> to execute the prompt. If the command doesnt't look right, hit Ctrl+C to cancel.
I appreciate the UI choice here. I have yet to do anything with AI (consciously and deliberately, anyway) but this sort of thing is exactly what I imagine as a proper use case.
While I love that that works, I still feel like just maybe ffmpeg needs a better interface. Not necessarily a GUI, just a better designed command line.
I think I’m finally sold on actually attempting to add some LLM to my toolbelt.
As a helper and not a replacement, this sounds grand. Like the most epic autocomplete. Because I hate how much time I waste trying to figure out the command line incantation when I already know precisely what I want to do. It’s the weakest part of the command line experience.
For the longest time I had ffmpeg in the same bucket as regex: "God I really need to learn this but I'm going to hate it so much." Then ChatGPT came along and solved both problems!
Interesting. Being able to use regexps for text processing through my career has probably saved me a few thousand hours of programming one-off solutions so far. It is one of those skills that really pays off to learn proper.
And speaking of ffmpeg, or tooling in general, I tend to make notes. After a while you end up with a pretty decent curated reference.
For me, it wasn’t so much learning ffmpeg, as it was understanding containers/codecs/encoders/streams/etc. Learning all of the intricacies there made ffmpeg make a lot more sense.
In addition to the many others mentioned, here's a script I just threw together that simplifies a lot of these chained commands - llmpeg: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg
If you have ffmpeg installed and an OpenAI env api key set, it should work out of the box.
learning how to use splits to do multiple things all in one command is a god send. the savings of only needed to read the source and convert to baseband video once is a great savings.
i started with avisynth, and it took time for my brain to switch to ffmpeg. i don't know how i could function without ffmpeg at this point
Truly, a net positive to my life. Just a few days ago I asked my AI buddy (Claude) to create a zsh script to organize my downloads folder according to the Johnny Decimal system. I’ve since modified it to move the files to a JD setup on my desktop.
The sense of elation I get when I wonder aloud to my digital friend and they generate what I thought was too much to expect. Well worth the subscription.
I think you're onto something. I've had hit or miss experiences with code from LLMs but it definitely makes the searching part different.
I had a problem I'd been thinking about for some time and I thought "Ill have some LLM give me an answer" and it did - it was wrong and didn't work but it got me to thinking about the problem in a slightly different way and my quacks after that got me an exact solution to this problem.
So I'm willing to give the AI more than partial credit.
Basic syntax for re-encoding a video file did take me some time to memorize, but isn't in fact too hard:
ffmpeg <Input file(s)> <Codec(s)> <MAPping of streams> <Video Filters> output_file
- input file: -i, can be repeated for multiple input files, like so:
ffmpeg -i file1.mp4 -i file2.mkv
If there is more than one input file then some mapping is needed to decide what goes out in the output file.
- codec: -c:x where x is the type of codec (v: video, a: audio or s:subtitles), followed by its name, like so:
-c:v libx265
I usually never set the audio codec as the guesses made by ffmpeg, based on output file type, are always right (in my experience), but deciding the video codec is useful, and so is the subtitles codec, as not all containers (file formats) support all codecs; mkv is the most flexible for subtitles codecs.
- mapping of streams: -map <input_file>:<stream_type>:<order>, like so:
-map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:1 -map 1:a:0 -map 1:s:4
Map tells ffmpeg what stream from the input files to put in the output file. The first number is the position of the input file in the command, so if we're following the same example as above, '0' would be 'file1.mp4' and '1' would be 'file2.mkv'. The parameter in the middle is the stream type (v for video, a for audio, s for subtitles). The last number is the position of the stream IN THE INPUT FILE (NOT in the output file).
The position of the stream in the output file is determined by the position of the map command in the command line, so for example in the command above we are inverting the position of the audio streams (taken from 'file2.mkv'), as audio stream 1 will be in first position in the output file, and audio stream 0 (the first in the second input file) will be in second position in the output file.
This map thing is for me the most counter-intuitive because it's unusual for a CLI to be order-dependent. But, well, it is.
- video filters: -vf
Video filters can be extremely complex and I don't pretend to know how to use them by heart. But one simple video filter that I use often is 'scale', for resizing a video:
-vf scale=<width>:<height>
width and height can be exact values in pixels, or one of them can be '-1' and then ffmpeg computes it based on the current aspect ratio and the other provided value, like this for example:
-vf scale=320:-1
This doesn't always work because the computed value should be an even integer; if it's not, ffmpeg will raise an error and tell you why; then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
And that's about it! ffmpeg options are immense, but this gets me through 90% of my video encoding needs, without looking at a manual or ask an LLM. (The only other options I use often are -ss and -t for start time and duration, to time-crop a video.)
> This doesn't always work because the computed value should be an even integer; if it's not, ffmpeg will raise an error and tell you why; then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
It's not about integer, but some of the sizes need to be even. You can use `-vf scale=320:-2` to ensure that.
> then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
Likely because the aspect ratio will no longer be the same. There will either be lost information (cropping), compression/stretching, or black bars, none of which should be default behaviour. Hence, the warning.
It already does. It’s the cli flags. What you’re missing is the semantic which you can get with learning about containers, codecs, and other stuff. You don’t use grep and sed with no understanding of what a text file is.
ffmpeg and jq are 2 commands I've about given up trying to "use" with any facility and am more than happy to pawn that off to one of the Gippity's; chat, claude, etc.
This reminds me I need to publish my write up on how I've been converting digitized home video tapes into clips using scene detection, but in case anyone is googling for it, here's a gist I landed on that does a good job of it [0] but sometimes it's fooled by e.g. camera flashes or camera shake so I need to give it a start and end file and have ffmpeg concatenate them back together [1]
Weird thing is I got better performance without "-c:v h264_videotoolbox" on latest Mac update, maybe some performance regression in Sequoia? I don't know. The equivalent flag for my windows machine with Nvidia GPU is "-c:v h264_nvenc" . I wonder why ffmpeg doesn't just auto detect this? I get about 8x performance boost from this. Probably the one time I actually earned my salary at work was when we were about to pay out the nose for more cloud servers with GPU to process video when I noticed the version of ffmpeg that came installed on the machines was compiled without GPU acceleration !
> Probably the one time I actually earned my salary at work was when we were about to pay out the nose for more cloud servers with GPU to process video when I noticed the version of ffmpeg that came installed on the machines was compiled without GPU acceleration !
Issue with cloud CPU's is that they don't come with any of the consumer grade CPU built-in hardware video encoders so you'll have to go with the GPU machines that cost so much more. To be honest I haven't tried using HW accel in the cloud to have a proper price comparison, are you saying you did it and it was worth it?
Are the hardware encoders even good? I thought that unless you need something realtime, it's always better to spend the cpu cycles on a better encode with th software encoder. Or have things changed ?
We were a quick and dirty R&D team that had to do a lot of video processing quickly, we were not very cost sensitive and didn’t have anything other than AWS to work with, so I can’t speak to whether it was worth it :)
In your snippets, you don't appear to be deinterlacing. If your pre-digitized clips are already deinterlaced, that's fine, but if they're not, you're encoding interlaced material as progressive, and mangling the quality. Try adding a bwdif filter so that your 30i content gets encoded as 60p (which will look more like the original videotapes).
I used ffmpeg for empty scene detection- I have a camera pointed at the flight path for SFO, and stripped out all the frames that didn't have motion in them. You end up with a continuous movie of planes passing through, with none of the boring bits.
> I wonder why ffmpeg doesn't just auto detect this?
Hardware encoding is often less configurable and involves greater trade-offs than using sophisticated software codecs, and don't produce exactly equivalent results even with equivalent parameters. On top of that, systems often have multiple hardware APIs to choose from that often different features.
FFMpeg is a complex command-line tool intended for users who are willing to learn its intricacies, so I'm not sure it makes sense for it to set defaults based on assumptions.
This is useful for batch encoding, when you're encoding a lot of different videos at once, because you can get better encoding throughput.
But in my limited experiments a while back, I found the output quality to be slightly worse than with libx264. I don't know if there's a way around it, but I'm not the only one who had that experience.
IIRC they have improved the hardware encoder over the generations of cards, but yes NVENC has worse quality than libx264. NVENC is really meant for running the compression in real-time with minimal performance impact to the system. Basically for recording/streaming games.
I've gotten pretty good at various bits of ffmpeg over time. Its CLI has a certain logic to it... it's order dependent (not all unix CLIs are).
Lately, I've been playing around with more esoteric functionality. For example, storing raw video straight off a video camera on a fairly slow machine. I built a microscope and it reads frames off the camera at 120FPS in raw video format (YUYV 1280x720) which is voluminous if you save it directly to disk (gigs per minute). Disks are cheap but that seemed wasteful, so I was curious about various close-to-lossless techniques to store the exact images, but compressed quickly. I've noticed that RGB24 conversion in ffmpeg is extremely slow, so instead after playing around with the command line I ended up with:
This reads in raw video- because raw video doesn't have a container, it lacks metadata like "pixel format" and "image size", so I have to provide those. It's order dependent- everything before "-i test.raw" is for decoding the input, and everythign after is for writing the output. I do one tiny pixel format conversion (that ffmpeg can do really fast) and then write the data out in a very, very close to lossless format with a container (I've found .mkv to be the best container in most cases).
Because I hate command lines, I ended up using ffmpeg-python which composes the command line from this:
and then I literally write() my frames into the stdin of that process. I had to limit the number of threads because the machine has 12 cores and uses at least 2 at all times to run the microscope.
I'm still looking for better/faster lossless YUV encoding.
>Its CLI has a certain logic to it... it's order dependent (not all unix CLIs are).
Which is appropriate. A Unix pipeline is dependent on the order of the components, and complex FFMpeg invocations entail doing something analogous.
>I ended up using ffmpeg-python which composes the command line from this
A lot of people like this aesthetic, but doing "fluent" interfaces like this is often considered un-Pythonic. (My understanding is that ffmpeg-python is designed to mirror the command-line order closely.) The preference (reinforced by the design of the standard library and built-in types) is to have strong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati... . By this principle, it would look something more like
where using a separate construction process for the input produces a different runtime type, which also cues the processing code that it needs to read from stdin.
To be honest what I really wanted is more like a programming API or config file than attempting to express complex pipelines and filters in a single command line.
As for what's unpythonic: don't care. My applications has code horrors that even Senior Fellows cannot unsee.
I spent some time with this on my data set, and in my hands I wasn't able to produce results that were convincingly better than libx264, but with slower encodes and larger output files. It's really hard to beat libx264.
This seems to be very forgotten tech. First time I used that was to load NetHack to ram instead of the slow diskette on my Atari. Now I still use it as webcache for work to not bother the database with so many requests.
When I set up the server, the ramdisk didn't have a way of shrinking when space wasn't needed so had to make sure it doesn't eat up all memory when growing unlimited. I bet it's smarter nowadays.
I thought this was going to be a website managed by an experienced user of FFmpeg sharing from their collection of accumulated knowledge, but then was immediately disappointed on the first example I clicked on.
Don’t call two extra tools to do string processing, that is insane. FFprobe is perfectly capable of giving you just the duration (or whatever) on its own:
> I think calling it "insane" is a bit of an exaggeration
Yes, I agree. It was decidedly the wrong word to use and the post would undoubtedly have been better without that part. Unfortunately, the edit window had already passed by the time I reread it.
FFmpeg is one of those tools I need to use so infrequently that he exact syntax never seems to stick. I've resorted to using an LLM to give me the command line I need. The only other tool that I ever had trouble with was 1990s-era MegaCLI from LSI Logic, also something I barely used from one year to the next (but one where you really need to get it right under pressure).
I've been using FFMPEG for 15+ years, and still can't remember almost any commands. LLMs have been amazing for using FFMPEG though. ChatGPT and Claude do wonders with "give me an ffmpeg command that will remux a video into mkv, include subtitle.srt in the file, and I only want it between 0:00:05 and 0:01:00." It produced this in case you were wondering: `ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i subtitle.srt -ss 00:00:05 -to 00:01:00 -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -c:s mov_text output.mkv`
I wonder how small of an LLM you could develop if you only wanted to target creating ffmpeg commands. Perhaps it could be small enough to be hosted on a static webpage where it is run locally?
Perhaps small enough to include in ffmpeg itself so you can just write commands `ffmpeg do this thing I want`.
Now I say this, it seems like there should already be a shell that is also an LLM where you can mix bits of commands you vaguely remember and natural language a bit like Del Boy speaking French...
Yeah I commented the other day, tongue firmly in cheek, that it's probably worth burning down all the rainforests just so LLMs can tell me the right ffmpeg flags to do what I want.
Don't forget that Gstreamer exists and its command line and documentation make a little bit more sense than ffmpeg because GStreamer is pipeline based and the composition is a little bit more sane. I stopped using ffmpeg entirely and only use GStreamer for intense video work.
Gstreamer can give you more control and has friendlier API's if you're gonna make a pipeline programatically but for one off stuff ffmpeg seems much friendlier to me. For example it has sane x264 defaults while with gst-launch you have to really know what you're doing to get quality x264 encoding
I thought FFmpeg is pipeline based too; graph of filters. Am I missing something? You can set up a complex graph of source, sink and transform filters.
I wish there was some sort of local gui / tool to drag and drop nodes, connect them together, type-check the graph if possible, and it would only show the ffmpeg command to run which you could paste.
Anyone know or anything?
You're right, but gstreamer is a little bit more sane for many use cases. Maybe ffmpeg is more advanced; I am not sure. I find the pieces fit together better with gstreamer.
ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format. I've had the displeasure of using the C api a few times, while it's straight forward in many respects, it makes invalid states extremely easy to represent. I would love a realtime AV1 encoding framework that "just works".
> ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format.
It’s one of the only tools where I reach for a GUI equivalent (Handbrake) by default, unless I’m doing batch processing. There are a few pure ffmpeg GUIs out there as well. There’s just something about working with video that CLI doesn’t work right with my brain for.
I can vouch for GStreamer as an API. I was using the Rust bindings so not super familiar with the C API but it looks good. GObject makes some things verbose but once you understand it you can interact with every object in the API consistently. There is a ton of necessary complexity (video is hard) but it’s really well designed and pretty well implemented and documented.
If you have a pretty normal use case the Bins (decodebin, transcodebin, playbin) make that pretty easy. If you have a more complex use case the flexibility of the design makes it possible.
ffmpeg API is somewhat clunky but it works fine. I dread working with gstreamer, sea of leaky abstractions, inexplicable workarounds and mysterious bugs.
One thing on Linux systems I like to do is build ffmpeg statically.. as distro versions are sometimes too old or don't include modules I prefer.. this containerized version has done wonders for me https://github.com/wader/static-ffmpeg
It's not a great name and not very discoverable, but there's a lot of very useful ffmpeg-by-example snippets there with illustrated results, and an explanation of what each option in each example does.
I love using FFMpeg via Wasm for ... senseless ... mini projects i.e.: https://video-2-sprites.franzai.com/ Video 2 Sprites Converter - totally over-engineered
I love "X by Example" sites! But if you don't work with a tool like ffmpeg imagemagick day in and out, there's no way you'll remember their unintuitive syntax or will want to spend the time to get your one-time job done. I'd still probably not use this site to scan a dozen of examples and try to put together the pieces of the puzzle; instead, I'd probably just use an LLM who already scanned the entire web corpus and can probably get me to a solution faster, right? At that point, I wonder what folks get out of this site?
ah, ffmpeg, the tool that powers the entire online video industry, praised for its stellar code...yet no one still knows how to use it without getting a phd in sherlocking the internet for miniscule and obscure references to common problems.
I was excited to see this as just last night I was using FFmpeg to combine digital (legally owned) movies with multiple parts into a single MKV file. It worked great, the one thing (and this is undoubtedly just a knowledge problem on my part), is I could not get it to copy/include subtitles from both parts. I have a feeling I might need to extract the subtitle files and combine them and then re-include the combined version, but was hoping there would be a solution in this site for doing something like that. Unfortunately, I didn't even see the combine as one of the examples.
For reference:
One-liner:
> ffmpeg -loglevel info -f concat -safe 0 -i <(for f in *.mkv; do echo "file '$(pwd)/$f"; done) -c copy output.mkv
Or the method I ended up using, create a files.txt file with each file listed[0]
One thing I have never been able to do reliably is get ffmpeg to split a file based on a fixed size - e.g. break this video into 100MB chunks.
The closest I seem to be able to get is to divide the file size by the file length, add some wiggle room and then split it based on time. Any pointers appreciated.
$ helpme ffmpeg capture video from /dev/video0 every 1 second and write to .jpg files like img00000.jpg, img00001.jpg, ...
$ helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps
$ helpme ffmpeg recompress myvideo.mp4 for HTML5-friendly use and save the result as myvideo_out.webm
I know there are full blown AI terminals like Warp but I didn't like the idea of a terminal app requiring a login, possibly sending all my commands to a server, etc. and just wanted a script that only calls the cloud AI when I ask it to.
"Print a text file to STDOUT using ffmpeg"
ffmpeg -v quiet -f data -i input.txt -map 0:0 -c text -f data -
I tried this in a directory with input.txt with some random text
Nothing.
So changed the verbosity to trace
ffmpeg -v trace -f data -i input.txt -map 0:0 -c text -f data -
---snip--
[dost#0:0 @ 0x625775f0ba80] Encoder 'text' specified, but only '-codec copy' supported for data streams
[dost#0:0 @ 0x625775f0ba80] Error selecting an encoder
Error opening output file -.
Error opening output files: Function not implemented
[AVIOContext @ 0x625775f09cc0] Statistics: 10 bytes read, 0 seeks
I was expecting text to be written to stdout?
What did I miss?
It's not working for me either, on FFmpeg 7.0.2. I suspect something has changed in FFmpeg since that command was shared on the Reddit post mentioned on the website. That was a few years ago.
However, from the same Reddit thread, this works:
ffmpeg -v quiet -f data -i input.txt -map 0 -f data pipe:1
EDIT: just verified the `-c text` approach works on FFmpeg major versions 4 and 5. From FFmpeg 6 onwards, it's broken. The `pipe:1` method works from FFmpeg 5 onwards, so the site should probably be updated to use that instead (also, FFmpeg 5.1 is an LTS release).
While it does have a rather unusual/bespoke command syntax (strongly motivating TFA), lately ffmpeg works my webcam more reliably than Google chrome. Too bad my other-side conversations don't have things set up to negotiate a session with it!
I'm grateful for sites like this and these days LLMs too. ffmpeg is awesome, but I can never rememeber the right incantation. The sites/tools get me the right ffmpeg answer, but I still needed to remember the answer next time (or look things up again). Now I save them as reusable commands: https://lmno.lol/alvaro/how-i-batch-apply-and-save-one-liner...
The great ffmpeg!, Even though you can generate commands using llm its still tedious to adjust things visually on cli so I ended up creating my own tool to generate ffmpeg commands.
Ya know, it's websites like this that make me want to see a "best of HNN" list, so it can be easily found when I'm using ffmpeg and saying "geez, there was some cool ffmpeg site, but where the heck is it?...."
Can we have a best of HNN and put it on there, or vote on it, or whatever?
I think at this point docs should start to be written not for humans but for LLMs, i.e. package all of it up with the --help into one giant txt file for easy attachment to an LLM when asking the question you'd like. Imo it's a relatively good fit to the current capability.
Somebody please pay people to create sites like this so LLMs can train on them and I never have to spend time thinking about arcane FFMPEG commands ever again. I remember losing whole days in the before times trying to figure out how to make FFMPEG do some highly specific set of things.
ffmpeg is so goated, I used it to merge video/audio from a mic on a camera I made ha
there was one time I didn't use pyaudio correctly so I was using this process where ffmpeg can stitch multiple audio files together into one passed in as an array cli argument, crazy
I was pretty happy because I was able to actually do something in ffmpeg recently. It is this amazingly powerfully tool, but every time I try to use it I get scared off by the inscrutable syntax. But this time as the mental miasma that usually kills my ffmpeg attempts was setting in I noticed something in the filter docs, a single throw away line about including files and the formatting of filters
Anyway long story short, instead of the usual terrifying inline ffmpeg filter tangle. the filter can be structured however you want and you can include it from a dedicated file. It sounds petty, but I really think it was the thing that finally let me "crack" ffmpeg
The secret sauce is the "/", "-/filter_complex file_name" will include the file as the filter.
As I am pretty happy with it I am going to inflect it on everyone here.
And there you have it, motion detection while staying in a single ffmpeg process, the glue logic watches stdout for the blackframe messages and saves the video.
explanation:
"[]" are named inputs and outputs
"," are pipes
";" ends a pipeline
take input 0 split it into two streams "motion" and "original". the motion stream gets scaled down, converted to gbrp(later blends were not working on yuv data) then temporally mixed with the previous two frames(remove high frequency motion), and sent to stream "camera". Take the zone mask image provided as input 1 and the "camera" stream, mask the camera stream, find the difference with the previous frame to bring out motion, blur to expand the motion pixels and then mask to black/white, invert the image for correct blackframe analyses which will print messages on stdout when too many motion pixels are present. The "original" stream get sent to the output for capture.
One odd thing is the mpegts, I tried a few more modern formats but none "stream" as well as mpegts. I will have to investigate further.
I could, and probably should have, used opencv to do the same. But I wanted to see if ffmpeg could do it.
No one seems to be talking about the website itself.
While as a concept, I absolutely love "X by Example" websites, this one seems to make some strange decisions. First, the top highlighted example is just an overly complicated `cat`. I understand that it's meant to show the versatility of the tool, but it's basically useless.
Then below, there's 3 pages of commands, 10 per page. No ordering whatsoever in terms of usefulness. There looks like there's an upvote but it's actually just a bullet decoration.
There's also a big "try online" button for a feature that's not actually implemented.
All in all, this is a pretty disappointing website that I don't think anyone in this thread will actually use, even though everyone seems to be "praising" it.
Creator of the site here, thanks for your comment.
The build system randomize an example to showcase on the homepage, I actually find it funny that its different example every time.
Regarding the upvote system. This is a static documentation website. I have created a crazy unique solution to have upvotes working but the website had literally zero traffic in years, so I guess that wasn't the most important feature to focus on.
I use Ffmpeg. I have zero interest in cloud based Ffmpeg.
Maybe if it was really cheap and the servers could process the job in a small fraction of the time it takes locally. Otherwise, I'd just run it locally.
If you built a ui that made it easier to use as part of the offering, it'd make sense for a lot of people.
if you're the creator might I suggest an ai.txt like a robots.txt of all the content? so we can pass it to an LLM and use it to create custom commands we need based on real needs? that would be awesome!
anyone know how to use ffmpeg to get a video to cross-fade from the end to the start so it makes a nice loop? I cant seem to get the right response from ChatGPT.
I love ffmpeg, but yeah, some bits are a little ... obscure.
Right now, I am looking to normalize some audio without using ffmpeg-normalize, a popular Python package. Nothing against it on a personal level, I just ... want to know what is going on, and it's a lot of files and lines of code to do what is basically a two-pass process.
I have a growing interest in metadata and that's also a case which I do not find is often well-addressed.
I've enjoyed using ffmpeg 1000% more since I was able to stop doing manually the tedious task of Googling for Stack Overflow answers and cobbling them into a command and got Chat GPT to write me commands instead.
I use ffmpeg multiple times a week thanks to LLMs. It's my top use-case for my "llm cmd" tool:
https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd
I tried this (though with a different tool called aichat) for extremely simple stuff like just "convert this mov to mp4" and it generated overly complex commands that failed due to missing libraries. When I removed the "crap" from the commands, they worked.
So much like code assistance, they still need a fair amount of baby sitting. A good boost for experienced operators but might suck for beginners.
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A while back I simply wrote my own bash function for this called `please`
as in
It will then courteously show you the command it wants to run before you agree to do it.
Here is the whole thing, with its two dependent functions, so that people stop writing their own versions of this lol. All it needs is an OPENAI_API_KEY, feel free to modify for other LLMs
EDIT: Moved to a gist: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/9ce17f7996347dd532f3e20a2a3...
Suggestions welcome- for example I want to add a feature that either just copies it (for further modification) or prepopulates the command line with it somehow (possibly for further modification, or even for skipping the approval step)
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Did you just invent the LLM-equivalent of curl-piping unread shell scripts into sh?
I am sure that will never cause any problems.
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"The future is already here. It's just not very well distributed"
(honestly, the work you share is very inspiring)
>This will then be displayed in your terminal ready for you to edit it, or hit <enter> to execute the prompt. If the command doesnt't look right, hit Ctrl+C to cancel.
I appreciate the UI choice here. I have yet to do anything with AI (consciously and deliberately, anyway) but this sort of thing is exactly what I imagine as a proper use case.
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Hypertalk <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk> lives.
uv?
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You should figure out what went wrong for the other commenter and fix your tool.
While I love that that works, I still feel like just maybe ffmpeg needs a better interface. Not necessarily a GUI, just a better designed command line.
I think I’m finally sold on actually attempting to add some LLM to my toolbelt.
As a helper and not a replacement, this sounds grand. Like the most epic autocomplete. Because I hate how much time I waste trying to figure out the command line incantation when I already know precisely what I want to do. It’s the weakest part of the command line experience.
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For the longest time I had ffmpeg in the same bucket as regex: "God I really need to learn this but I'm going to hate it so much." Then ChatGPT came along and solved both problems!
Interesting. Being able to use regexps for text processing through my career has probably saved me a few thousand hours of programming one-off solutions so far. It is one of those skills that really pays off to learn proper.
And speaking of ffmpeg, or tooling in general, I tend to make notes. After a while you end up with a pretty decent curated reference.
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Not sure about ffmpeg, but you should definitely try memorising regexp. Casual Search&replace that becomes possible is worth it.
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Gotta be honest, years of configuring automod on Reddit have honed me into a regex God.
For me, it wasn’t so much learning ffmpeg, as it was understanding containers/codecs/encoders/streams/etc. Learning all of the intricacies there made ffmpeg make a lot more sense.
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... Then ChatGPT came along and I had 3 problems! https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
CSS has entered the ChatGPT.
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Same here, it's one of these things where AI has taken over completely and I'm just a broker that copy-pastes error traces.
In addition to the many others mentioned, here's a script I just threw together that simplifies a lot of these chained commands - llmpeg: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg
If you have ffmpeg installed and an OpenAI env api key set, it should work out of the box.
Demo: https://image.non.io/1c7a92ef-0917-49ef-9460-6298c7a9116c.we...
My experience got even better once I learned how complex filters worked.
learning how to use splits to do multiple things all in one command is a god send. the savings of only needed to read the source and convert to baseband video once is a great savings.
i started with avisynth, and it took time for my brain to switch to ffmpeg. i don't know how i could function without ffmpeg at this point
Truly, a net positive to my life. Just a few days ago I asked my AI buddy (Claude) to create a zsh script to organize my downloads folder according to the Johnny Decimal system. I’ve since modified it to move the files to a JD setup on my desktop.
The sense of elation I get when I wonder aloud to my digital friend and they generate what I thought was too much to expect. Well worth the subscription.
I ended up creating my own tool to generate ffmpeg commands https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/
I think you're onto something. I've had hit or miss experiences with code from LLMs but it definitely makes the searching part different.
I had a problem I'd been thinking about for some time and I thought "Ill have some LLM give me an answer" and it did - it was wrong and didn't work but it got me to thinking about the problem in a slightly different way and my quacks after that got me an exact solution to this problem.
So I'm willing to give the AI more than partial credit.
Basic syntax for re-encoding a video file did take me some time to memorize, but isn't in fact too hard:
- input file: -i, can be repeated for multiple input files, like so:
If there is more than one input file then some mapping is needed to decide what goes out in the output file.
- codec: -c:x where x is the type of codec (v: video, a: audio or s:subtitles), followed by its name, like so:
I usually never set the audio codec as the guesses made by ffmpeg, based on output file type, are always right (in my experience), but deciding the video codec is useful, and so is the subtitles codec, as not all containers (file formats) support all codecs; mkv is the most flexible for subtitles codecs.
- mapping of streams: -map <input_file>:<stream_type>:<order>, like so:
Map tells ffmpeg what stream from the input files to put in the output file. The first number is the position of the input file in the command, so if we're following the same example as above, '0' would be 'file1.mp4' and '1' would be 'file2.mkv'. The parameter in the middle is the stream type (v for video, a for audio, s for subtitles). The last number is the position of the stream IN THE INPUT FILE (NOT in the output file).
The position of the stream in the output file is determined by the position of the map command in the command line, so for example in the command above we are inverting the position of the audio streams (taken from 'file2.mkv'), as audio stream 1 will be in first position in the output file, and audio stream 0 (the first in the second input file) will be in second position in the output file.
This map thing is for me the most counter-intuitive because it's unusual for a CLI to be order-dependent. But, well, it is.
- video filters: -vf
Video filters can be extremely complex and I don't pretend to know how to use them by heart. But one simple video filter that I use often is 'scale', for resizing a video:
width and height can be exact values in pixels, or one of them can be '-1' and then ffmpeg computes it based on the current aspect ratio and the other provided value, like this for example:
This doesn't always work because the computed value should be an even integer; if it's not, ffmpeg will raise an error and tell you why; then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
And that's about it! ffmpeg options are immense, but this gets me through 90% of my video encoding needs, without looking at a manual or ask an LLM. (The only other options I use often are -ss and -t for start time and duration, to time-crop a video.)
> This doesn't always work because the computed value should be an even integer; if it's not, ffmpeg will raise an error and tell you why; then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
It's not about integer, but some of the sizes need to be even. You can use `-vf scale=320:-2` to ensure that.
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> then you can replace the -1 with the nearest even integer (I wonder why it can't do that by itself, but apparently, it can't).
Likely because the aspect ratio will no longer be the same. There will either be lost information (cropping), compression/stretching, or black bars, none of which should be default behaviour. Hence, the warning.
I would like to throw in a tool that I built into the ring: gencmd - https://gencmd.com/. There is a web version and also a CLI version.
If the CLI is installed, you can do: gencmd -c ffmpeg extract first 1 minute of video
Or you can just search for the same in the browser page.
I do it the old way: I write down the commands as a shell script, and reuse later.
But really what ffmpeg is missing is an expressive language to describe its operation. Something well-structured, like what jq does for JSON.
It already does. It’s the cli flags. What you’re missing is the semantic which you can get with learning about containers, codecs, and other stuff. You don’t use grep and sed with no understanding of what a text file is.
ffmpeg and jq are 2 commands I've about given up trying to "use" with any facility and am more than happy to pawn that off to one of the Gippity's; chat, claude, etc.
For me it was using a container of it, instead of having to install all the things FFmpeg needs on a machine.
Why not just use Handbrake? It’s just FFMpeg but with a GUI.
That's fine for encoding but Handbrake doesn't let you do video streaming to my knowledge.
llm - Clippit of 202x, but for the original Pentium was enough.
This reminds me I need to publish my write up on how I've been converting digitized home video tapes into clips using scene detection, but in case anyone is googling for it, here's a gist I landed on that does a good job of it [0] but sometimes it's fooled by e.g. camera flashes or camera shake so I need to give it a start and end file and have ffmpeg concatenate them back together [1]
Weird thing is I got better performance without "-c:v h264_videotoolbox" on latest Mac update, maybe some performance regression in Sequoia? I don't know. The equivalent flag for my windows machine with Nvidia GPU is "-c:v h264_nvenc" . I wonder why ffmpeg doesn't just auto detect this? I get about 8x performance boost from this. Probably the one time I actually earned my salary at work was when we were about to pay out the nose for more cloud servers with GPU to process video when I noticed the version of ffmpeg that came installed on the machines was compiled without GPU acceleration !
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/nielsbom/c86c504fa5fd61ae...
[1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jazzyjackson/bf9282df0a40...
> Probably the one time I actually earned my salary at work was when we were about to pay out the nose for more cloud servers with GPU to process video when I noticed the version of ffmpeg that came installed on the machines was compiled without GPU acceleration !
Issue with cloud CPU's is that they don't come with any of the consumer grade CPU built-in hardware video encoders so you'll have to go with the GPU machines that cost so much more. To be honest I haven't tried using HW accel in the cloud to have a proper price comparison, are you saying you did it and it was worth it?
Are the hardware encoders even good? I thought that unless you need something realtime, it's always better to spend the cpu cycles on a better encode with th software encoder. Or have things changed ?
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We were a quick and dirty R&D team that had to do a lot of video processing quickly, we were not very cost sensitive and didn’t have anything other than AWS to work with, so I can’t speak to whether it was worth it :)
In your snippets, you don't appear to be deinterlacing. If your pre-digitized clips are already deinterlaced, that's fine, but if they're not, you're encoding interlaced material as progressive, and mangling the quality. Try adding a bwdif filter so that your 30i content gets encoded as 60p (which will look more like the original videotapes).
I used ffmpeg for empty scene detection- I have a camera pointed at the flight path for SFO, and stripped out all the frames that didn't have motion in them. You end up with a continuous movie of planes passing through, with none of the boring bits.
Then can you merge all the clips starting when motion starts and see hundreds of planes fly across at once?
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> I wonder why ffmpeg doesn't just auto detect this?
Hardware encoding is often less configurable and involves greater trade-offs than using sophisticated software codecs, and don't produce exactly equivalent results even with equivalent parameters. On top of that, systems often have multiple hardware APIs to choose from that often different features.
FFMpeg is a complex command-line tool intended for users who are willing to learn its intricacies, so I'm not sure it makes sense for it to set defaults based on assumptions.
This is useful for batch encoding, when you're encoding a lot of different videos at once, because you can get better encoding throughput.
But in my limited experiments a while back, I found the output quality to be slightly worse than with libx264. I don't know if there's a way around it, but I'm not the only one who had that experience.
IIRC they have improved the hardware encoder over the generations of cards, but yes NVENC has worse quality than libx264. NVENC is really meant for running the compression in real-time with minimal performance impact to the system. Basically for recording/streaming games.
So counterintuitive that nvenc confers worse quality than QSV/x264 variants, but it is both in theory and in my testing as well.
But for multiple streams or speed requirements, nvenc is the only way to fly.
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Co-signing. Encode time was faster with nvenc, but quality was noticeably worse even to my untrained eye.
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I've gotten pretty good at various bits of ffmpeg over time. Its CLI has a certain logic to it... it's order dependent (not all unix CLIs are).
Lately, I've been playing around with more esoteric functionality. For example, storing raw video straight off a video camera on a fairly slow machine. I built a microscope and it reads frames off the camera at 120FPS in raw video format (YUYV 1280x720) which is voluminous if you save it directly to disk (gigs per minute). Disks are cheap but that seemed wasteful, so I was curious about various close-to-lossless techniques to store the exact images, but compressed quickly. I've noticed that RGB24 conversion in ffmpeg is extremely slow, so instead after playing around with the command line I ended up with:
This reads in raw video- because raw video doesn't have a container, it lacks metadata like "pixel format" and "image size", so I have to provide those. It's order dependent- everything before "-i test.raw" is for decoding the input, and everythign after is for writing the output. I do one tiny pixel format conversion (that ffmpeg can do really fast) and then write the data out in a very, very close to lossless format with a container (I've found .mkv to be the best container in most cases).
Because I hate command lines, I ended up using ffmpeg-python which composes the command line from this:
and then I literally write() my frames into the stdin of that process. I had to limit the number of threads because the machine has 12 cores and uses at least 2 at all times to run the microscope.
I'm still looking for better/faster lossless YUV encoding.
>Its CLI has a certain logic to it... it's order dependent (not all unix CLIs are).
Which is appropriate. A Unix pipeline is dependent on the order of the components, and complex FFMpeg invocations entail doing something analogous.
>I ended up using ffmpeg-python which composes the command line from this
A lot of people like this aesthetic, but doing "fluent" interfaces like this is often considered un-Pythonic. (My understanding is that ffmpeg-python is designed to mirror the command-line order closely.) The preference (reinforced by the design of the standard library and built-in types) is to have strong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati... . By this principle, it would look something more like
where using a separate construction process for the input produces a different runtime type, which also cues the processing code that it needs to read from stdin.
To be honest what I really wanted is more like a programming API or config file than attempting to express complex pipelines and filters in a single command line.
As for what's unpythonic: don't care. My applications has code horrors that even Senior Fellows cannot unsee.
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Similar, arguably simpler, Python library that provides an interface to FFmpeg command line is ffmpy [0], of which I am the author.
[0] https://github.com/Ch00k/ffmpy
> I'm still looking for better/faster lossless YUV encoding.
Look no further: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/FFV1
I spent some time with this on my data set, and in my hands I wasn't able to produce results that were convincingly better than libx264, but with slower encodes and larger output files. It's really hard to beat libx264.
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I am here to sell you on one word: ramdisks.
If you are doing processing with intermediate steps you do not want to keep? Ramdisks. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
This seems to be very forgotten tech. First time I used that was to load NetHack to ram instead of the slow diskette on my Atari. Now I still use it as webcache for work to not bother the database with so many requests.
When I set up the server, the ramdisk didn't have a way of shrinking when space wasn't needed so had to make sure it doesn't eat up all memory when growing unlimited. I bet it's smarter nowadays.
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Slow ffmpeg pipelines are typically cpu-bound rather than io-bound.
e.g. When doing a simple copy, progress status messages upgrade to scientific notation.
I thought this was going to be a website managed by an experienced user of FFmpeg sharing from their collection of accumulated knowledge, but then was immediately disappointed on the first example I clicked on.
https://www.ffmpegbyexample.com/examples/l1bilxyl/get_the_du...
Don’t call two extra tools to do string processing, that is insane. FFprobe is perfectly capable of giving you just the duration (or whatever) on its own:
Don’t simply stop at the first thing that works; once it does think to yourself if maybe there is a way to improve it.
Hi, original poster here. I think calling it "insane" is a bit of an exaggeration lol. Don't you think?
I like your solution better!
> I think calling it "insane" is a bit of an exaggeration
Yes, I agree. It was decidedly the wrong word to use and the post would undoubtedly have been better without that part. Unfortunately, the edit window had already passed by the time I reread it.
Nice! This reminds me of my own ffmpeg cheatsheet; I would imagine that everyone who uses ffmpeg frequently has a similar set of notes
https://github.com/fastily/cheatsheet/blob/master/ffmpeg.md
FWIW, mine: https://github.com/ericfortis/quick-reference/blob/main/ffmp...
FFmpeg is one of those tools I need to use so infrequently that he exact syntax never seems to stick. I've resorted to using an LLM to give me the command line I need. The only other tool that I ever had trouble with was 1990s-era MegaCLI from LSI Logic, also something I barely used from one year to the next (but one where you really need to get it right under pressure).
I've been using FFMPEG for 15+ years, and still can't remember almost any commands. LLMs have been amazing for using FFMPEG though. ChatGPT and Claude do wonders with "give me an ffmpeg command that will remux a video into mkv, include subtitle.srt in the file, and I only want it between 0:00:05 and 0:01:00." It produced this in case you were wondering: `ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i subtitle.srt -ss 00:00:05 -to 00:01:00 -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -c:s mov_text output.mkv`
I wonder how small of an LLM you could develop if you only wanted to target creating ffmpeg commands. Perhaps it could be small enough to be hosted on a static webpage where it is run locally?
Perhaps small enough to include in ffmpeg itself so you can just write commands `ffmpeg do this thing I want`.
Now I say this, it seems like there should already be a shell that is also an LLM where you can mix bits of commands you vaguely remember and natural language a bit like Del Boy speaking French...
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-c:s mov_text is unnecessary and in fact might be fucking things up
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I've just maintained my own note doc, going on 15 years now, of my most commonly used syntax. When that fails, I grep my bash history.
Same. The only thing that sticks is converting from format X to .mp4. Everything else I need to look up every single time.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1168/
Yeah I commented the other day, tongue firmly in cheek, that it's probably worth burning down all the rainforests just so LLMs can tell me the right ffmpeg flags to do what I want.
Don't forget that Gstreamer exists and its command line and documentation make a little bit more sense than ffmpeg because GStreamer is pipeline based and the composition is a little bit more sane. I stopped using ffmpeg entirely and only use GStreamer for intense video work.
Gstreamer can give you more control and has friendlier API's if you're gonna make a pipeline programatically but for one off stuff ffmpeg seems much friendlier to me. For example it has sane x264 defaults while with gst-launch you have to really know what you're doing to get quality x264 encoding
I thought FFmpeg is pipeline based too; graph of filters. Am I missing something? You can set up a complex graph of source, sink and transform filters.
FFmpeg's filter DSL is so good that I get annoyed if I ever have to fall back to command line switches.
I wish there was some sort of local gui / tool to drag and drop nodes, connect them together, type-check the graph if possible, and it would only show the ffmpeg command to run which you could paste. Anyone know or anything?
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You're right, but gstreamer is a little bit more sane for many use cases. Maybe ffmpeg is more advanced; I am not sure. I find the pieces fit together better with gstreamer.
GStreamer feels like abandonware though, they also got big vulnerabilities recently, and their docs are very defunct.
Not sure about the vulns but I am actively discussing things with the devs on their Matrix
Here is the GitHub repo for a ffmpeg book which may be a nice supplement to this site:
https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook
Oh this is nice, thank you!
ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format. I've had the displeasure of using the C api a few times, while it's straight forward in many respects, it makes invalid states extremely easy to represent. I would love a realtime AV1 encoding framework that "just works".
> ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format.
It’s one of the only tools where I reach for a GUI equivalent (Handbrake) by default, unless I’m doing batch processing. There are a few pure ffmpeg GUIs out there as well. There’s just something about working with video that CLI doesn’t work right with my brain for.
I can vouch for GStreamer as an API. I was using the Rust bindings so not super familiar with the C API but it looks good. GObject makes some things verbose but once you understand it you can interact with every object in the API consistently. There is a ton of necessary complexity (video is hard) but it’s really well designed and pretty well implemented and documented.
If you have a pretty normal use case the Bins (decodebin, transcodebin, playbin) make that pretty easy. If you have a more complex use case the flexibility of the design makes it possible.
ffmpeg API is somewhat clunky but it works fine. I dread working with gstreamer, sea of leaky abstractions, inexplicable workarounds and mysterious bugs.
I like this insight, but TUI is something graphical while ffmpeg is just CLI.
It would be cool to see if a TUI tool existed. Something like https://github.com/Twinklebear/fbed but more feature complete.
One thing on Linux systems I like to do is build ffmpeg statically.. as distro versions are sometimes too old or don't include modules I prefer.. this containerized version has done wonders for me https://github.com/wader/static-ffmpeg
The AMIA has a resource for this as well at https://amiaopensource.github.io/ffmprovisr/
It's not a great name and not very discoverable, but there's a lot of very useful ffmpeg-by-example snippets there with illustrated results, and an explanation of what each option in each example does.
I love using FFMpeg via Wasm for ... senseless ... mini projects i.e.: https://video-2-sprites.franzai.com/ Video 2 Sprites Converter - totally over-engineered
Love the bouncing progress bar. Also nice ffmpeg wasm only 11MB
I love "X by Example" sites! But if you don't work with a tool like ffmpeg imagemagick day in and out, there's no way you'll remember their unintuitive syntax or will want to spend the time to get your one-time job done. I'd still probably not use this site to scan a dozen of examples and try to put together the pieces of the puzzle; instead, I'd probably just use an LLM who already scanned the entire web corpus and can probably get me to a solution faster, right? At that point, I wonder what folks get out of this site?
Its for when people google how do I do X. Also, I've built this site before chatgpt was a thing...
ah, ffmpeg, the tool that powers the entire online video industry, praised for its stellar code...yet no one still knows how to use it without getting a phd in sherlocking the internet for miniscule and obscure references to common problems.
I was excited to see this as just last night I was using FFmpeg to combine digital (legally owned) movies with multiple parts into a single MKV file. It worked great, the one thing (and this is undoubtedly just a knowledge problem on my part), is I could not get it to copy/include subtitles from both parts. I have a feeling I might need to extract the subtitle files and combine them and then re-include the combined version, but was hoping there would be a solution in this site for doing something like that. Unfortunately, I didn't even see the combine as one of the examples.
For reference:
One-liner:
> ffmpeg -loglevel info -f concat -safe 0 -i <(for f in *.mkv; do echo "file '$(pwd)/$f"; done) -c copy output.mkv
Or the method I ended up using, create a files.txt file with each file listed[0]
> ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i files.txt -c copy output.mkv
files.txt
> file 'file 1.mkv' > file 'file 2.mkv' > # list any additional files
0: https://ma.ttias.be/use-ffmpeg-combine-multiple-videos/
This will fail on most inputs
One thing I have never been able to do reliably is get ffmpeg to split a file based on a fixed size - e.g. break this video into 100MB chunks.
The closest I seem to be able to get is to divide the file size by the file length, add some wiggle room and then split it based on time. Any pointers appreciated.
also worthwhile consulting this resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM
I just use LLMs to help me with ffmpeg (and many other similarly complex tools) commands: https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme
I know there are full blown AI terminals like Warp but I didn't like the idea of a terminal app requiring a login, possibly sending all my commands to a server, etc. and just wanted a script that only calls the cloud AI when I ask it to.
Yea agreed, these kinds of websites feel obsolete now with LLMs. I just tried a couple in ChatGPT and it worked flawlessly.
Where do you think the LLMs get their ffmpeg commands from?
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"Print a text file to STDOUT using ffmpeg" ffmpeg -v quiet -f data -i input.txt -map 0:0 -c text -f data - I tried this in a directory with input.txt with some random text Nothing.
So changed the verbosity to trace ffmpeg -v trace -f data -i input.txt -map 0:0 -c text -f data -
---snip-- [dost#0:0 @ 0x625775f0ba80] Encoder 'text' specified, but only '-codec copy' supported for data streams [dost#0:0 @ 0x625775f0ba80] Error selecting an encoder Error opening output file -. Error opening output files: Function not implemented [AVIOContext @ 0x625775f09cc0] Statistics: 10 bytes read, 0 seeks
I was expecting text to be written to stdout? What did I miss?
It's not working for me either, on FFmpeg 7.0.2. I suspect something has changed in FFmpeg since that command was shared on the Reddit post mentioned on the website. That was a few years ago.
However, from the same Reddit thread, this works:
ffmpeg -v quiet -f data -i input.txt -map 0 -f data pipe:1
EDIT: just verified the `-c text` approach works on FFmpeg major versions 4 and 5. From FFmpeg 6 onwards, it's broken. The `pipe:1` method works from FFmpeg 5 onwards, so the site should probably be updated to use that instead (also, FFmpeg 5.1 is an LTS release).
Thanks, yes they should update the site.
https://x.com/i/grok/share/rhb9niOru2tk17SdEqIhLvfhV
When I read that, it resembles very much the format of responses from copilot.microsoft.com
especially: point 4 is the final giveaway!
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While it does have a rather unusual/bespoke command syntax (strongly motivating TFA), lately ffmpeg works my webcam more reliably than Google chrome. Too bad my other-side conversations don't have things set up to negotiate a session with it!
I'm grateful for sites like this and these days LLMs too. ffmpeg is awesome, but I can never rememeber the right incantation. The sites/tools get me the right ffmpeg answer, but I still needed to remember the answer next time (or look things up again). Now I save them as reusable commands: https://lmno.lol/alvaro/how-i-batch-apply-and-save-one-liner...
See also:
* https://img.ly/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ffmpeg/
* https://ffmpeg.lav.io/
* https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial
* https://www.hadet.dev/ffmpeg-cheatsheet/
The great ffmpeg!, Even though you can generate commands using llm its still tedious to adjust things visually on cli so I ended up creating my own tool to generate ffmpeg commands.
https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/
Ya know, it's websites like this that make me want to see a "best of HNN" list, so it can be easily found when I'm using ffmpeg and saying "geez, there was some cool ffmpeg site, but where the heck is it?...."
Can we have a best of HNN and put it on there, or vote on it, or whatever?
You can "favorite" individual comments or entire submitted threads and revist them via your ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Over2Chars ) user page favorite links.
Which indeed you have: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Over2Chars
There are a number of HN lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
"Best": https://news.ycombinator.com/best is highest voted recent links.
Nice! I am a HNN newb.
I finally found that six point font "favorite" that appears only once and at the top of the comment section for a topic.
You guys don't make it easy.
I think at this point docs should start to be written not for humans but for LLMs, i.e. package all of it up with the --help into one giant txt file for easy attachment to an LLM when asking the question you'd like. Imo it's a relatively good fit to the current capability.
Somebody please pay people to create sites like this so LLMs can train on them and I never have to spend time thinking about arcane FFMPEG commands ever again. I remember losing whole days in the before times trying to figure out how to make FFMPEG do some highly specific set of things.
https://ko-fi.com/ffmpegbyexample
The first video doesn't seem to work in Safari or Firefox, only Chrome. "Video can't be played because the file is corrupt." On Mac at least.
ffmpeg is so goated, I used it to merge video/audio from a mic on a camera I made ha
there was one time I didn't use pyaudio correctly so I was using this process where ffmpeg can stitch multiple audio files together into one passed in as an array cli argument, crazy
hey everyone, thanks for the "hunt".
Currently looking for an FFmpeg related job https://gariany.com/about
I was pretty happy because I was able to actually do something in ffmpeg recently. It is this amazingly powerfully tool, but every time I try to use it I get scared off by the inscrutable syntax. But this time as the mental miasma that usually kills my ffmpeg attempts was setting in I noticed something in the filter docs, a single throw away line about including files and the formatting of filters
Anyway long story short, instead of the usual terrifying inline ffmpeg filter tangle. the filter can be structured however you want and you can include it from a dedicated file. It sounds petty, but I really think it was the thing that finally let me "crack" ffmpeg
The secret sauce is the "/", "-/filter_complex file_name" will include the file as the filter.
As I am pretty happy with it I am going to inflect it on everyone here.
In motion_detect.filter
And then some python glue logic around the command
And there you have it, motion detection while staying in a single ffmpeg process, the glue logic watches stdout for the blackframe messages and saves the video.
explanation:
"[]" are named inputs and outputs
"," are pipes
";" ends a pipeline
take input 0 split it into two streams "motion" and "original". the motion stream gets scaled down, converted to gbrp(later blends were not working on yuv data) then temporally mixed with the previous two frames(remove high frequency motion), and sent to stream "camera". Take the zone mask image provided as input 1 and the "camera" stream, mask the camera stream, find the difference with the previous frame to bring out motion, blur to expand the motion pixels and then mask to black/white, invert the image for correct blackframe analyses which will print messages on stdout when too many motion pixels are present. The "original" stream get sent to the output for capture.
One odd thing is the mpegts, I tried a few more modern formats but none "stream" as well as mpegts. I will have to investigate further.
I could, and probably should have, used opencv to do the same. But I wanted to see if ffmpeg could do it.
No one seems to be talking about the website itself.
While as a concept, I absolutely love "X by Example" websites, this one seems to make some strange decisions. First, the top highlighted example is just an overly complicated `cat`. I understand that it's meant to show the versatility of the tool, but it's basically useless.
Then below, there's 3 pages of commands, 10 per page. No ordering whatsoever in terms of usefulness. There looks like there's an upvote but it's actually just a bullet decoration.
There's also a big "try online" button for a feature that's not actually implemented.
All in all, this is a pretty disappointing website that I don't think anyone in this thread will actually use, even though everyone seems to be "praising" it.
Creator of the site here, thanks for your comment.
The build system randomize an example to showcase on the homepage, I actually find it funny that its different example every time.
Regarding the upvote system. This is a static documentation website. I have created a crazy unique solution to have upvotes working but the website had literally zero traffic in years, so I guess that wasn't the most important feature to focus on.
Sorry to disappoint, I'm doing it completely voluntary - happy to get any help here: https://github.com/eladg/ffmpeg-by-example
Kind of OT: Does anyone know any video editing library in Python that adds fancy/animated text with background?
Are ffmpeg user interested in a cloud base solution?
You push the input files, the command, and fetch the output when done.
I use Ffmpeg. I have zero interest in cloud based Ffmpeg.
Maybe if it was really cheap and the servers could process the job in a small fraction of the time it takes locally. Otherwise, I'd just run it locally.
If you built a ui that made it easier to use as part of the offering, it'd make sense for a lot of people.
Thanks!
Why you think that an UI would make sense?
An UI like what? Something to drive the user toward what it wants to do?
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There's quite a few cloud services built around it already, but not usually so loose or general. I can see it being expensive to run.
The plan would it be to charge it at cost plus. Whatever the user is consuming plus a markup.
if you're the creator might I suggest an ai.txt like a robots.txt of all the content? so we can pass it to an LLM and use it to create custom commands we need based on real needs? that would be awesome!
Apparently it is still not part of the latest version of gohugo... we will get there.
ref: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/12983
I wouldn't be surprised if most LLMs already knew how to do most of these out of the box.
anyone know how to use ffmpeg to get a video to cross-fade from the end to the start so it makes a nice loop? I cant seem to get the right response from ChatGPT.
Wow, I wish I had seen this literally yesterday!
I love ffmpeg, but yeah, some bits are a little ... obscure.
Right now, I am looking to normalize some audio without using ffmpeg-normalize, a popular Python package. Nothing against it on a personal level, I just ... want to know what is going on, and it's a lot of files and lines of code to do what is basically a two-pass process.
I have a growing interest in metadata and that's also a case which I do not find is often well-addressed.
wish there was a website like this for gstreamer
i believe this is where LLM will excel
Gotta leave this here for those that haven’t seen it :)
https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM
Now I know what to read over the next weekend!
you can contribute too :)