Comment by Philpax
4 days ago
Hate to be that guy, but which LLM was doing the generation? GPT-4 Turbo / Claude 3.x have not really let me down in generating ffmpeg commands - especially for basic requests - with most of their failures resulting from domain-specific vagaries that an expert would need to weigh in on m
GPT-4
Fair enough. If you remember what you were testing with, I'd love to try it again to see if things are better now.
You have a fair point. Some LLMs are better at some tasks, and prompts can make a difference no doubt.
Perhaps at some point there will be a triage LLM to slurp up the problem and then decide which secondary LLM is most optimal for that query, and some tertiary LLMs that execute and evaluate it in a virtual machine, etc.
Maybe someday
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Hate to be that guy, but which model works without fail for any task that ffmpeg can do?
"Writing working commands first try for every single ffmpeg feature that exists" is the highest bar I've ever heard of, I love it. I'm gonna start listing it as a requirement on job postings. Like an ffmpeg speedrun.
Yes and every failure of a product turns into a support ticket.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1168/.
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I don't think there's a single human on or outside of this planet that can meet that requirement, but Claude has been pretty good to me. It's certainly a much better starting point than pouring over docs and SO posts.
In my experience you still get a lot of stuff that used to work or stuff that it just makes up.
I know I struggled on getting a good command to “simply” make the videos from my Z8 smaller (in file size).
Usually the color was wrong and I don’t care enough to learn about colorspaces to figure out how to fix it and it’s utterly insane how difficult it is even with LLMs.
Just reencode it as is but a little more lossy. Is that so hard?
Handbrake may be a better option for you. I find that for some tasks it’s not only simpler but straight up works better than FFmpeg.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/cli/cli-options.html
This doesnt exist in reality so in one sense, you could challenge the relevance
I think in the non LLM world though you at least have the trail of documentation you can unwind once you're in a bind. I don't care for prompt-a-mole fighting.