Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!
Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.
Another option is to use a non-cli LLM and ask it to produce a script (bash/ps1) that uses ffmpeg to do X, Y, and Z to your video files. If using a chat LLM it will often provide suggestions or ask questions to improve your processing as well. I do this often and the results are quite good.
Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!
Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.
Just seeking a clarification on how this would be done:
One would use gemini-cli (or claude-cli),
- and give a natural language prompt to gemini (or claude) on what processing needs to be done,
- with the correct paths to FFmpeg and the media file,
- and g-cli (or c-cli) would take it from there.
Is this correct?
Another option is to use a non-cli LLM and ask it to produce a script (bash/ps1) that uses ffmpeg to do X, Y, and Z to your video files. If using a chat LLM it will often provide suggestions or ask questions to improve your processing as well. I do this often and the results are quite good.
Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.
Thank you.
Curious to see how quickly each LLM picks up the new codecs/options.
I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out
the canonical (if that's the right word for a 2-year-old technique) solution is to paste the whole manual into the context before asking questions
Gemini can now load context from a URL in the API (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/url-context), but I'm not sure if that has made it to the web interfaces yet.