webdevver
7 hours ago
chatgpt has revolutionized ffmpeg for me. i had no idea how powerful it was and the crazy oneliners you could do - i had this small project to make a moving collage of video frames, and chatgpt produced the crazy invocation for it. it even showed me how to use intel quicksync.
the point is, there is no way i would have been able to figure out the command line myself. it still trips up every now and then (at which point im often screwed), but i can atleast finally use the tool.
thrdbndndn
6 hours ago
It has been said at every single post about ffmpeg (and it's true!) so I would also add my obligatory comment:
DO use ChatGPT to help you to write ffmpeg commands, but at least has some basic understanding of how ffmpeg works -- especially the fact that it works like a pipeline so the order of the options absolutely matters.
And ChatGPT often throw lots of unnecessary options (sometimes even do harm), so do actually investigate what each switch is supposed to do (ChatGPT can help with that too) if you're going to use the generated command for something semi-serious.
If possible, try to keep the switches as few as possible and avoid exotic flags. But do pay attention to pixel format and colorspace options to make your video as compatible as possible. It's very easy to mess things up for doing even seemingly simple tasks (like converting static images to slideshow etc.)
Kinrany
6 hours ago
I have the experience of reading an ffmpeg one-liner (that really took more like five lines with wraparound) and trying to understand it. Half the options seemed unnecessary, but every single one of them would break the script when removed.
frde_me
6 hours ago
We had to encode a lot of videos at work once to play back to users. The resulting FFMPEG commands ended up being so complicated, every argument had about a one paragraph comment explaining it
Had to try and fix a bug with that script and it took me hours just to get some understanding of it.
Makes me wonder if video processing is just that complicated, or if someone could make some sort of simpler tool for this
ssl-3
5 hours ago
There's simpler tools like Handbrake that present a GUI for handling many video encoding tasks, or even things like Tdarr for distributed transcoding tasks.
But if you're documenting it right then you'll still need a paragraph explaining what every checkbox does...
amonith
6 hours ago
ffmpeg should be config-based with verbose descriptive names for everything. It doesn't make sense in its CLI form. It's far from human-readable since a very long time.
RedShift1
6 hours ago
Yeah it doesn't help that the manpage is so unwieldy, quite annoying that you can't find an option that you specify like this: "-abc", but in the manpage it's just documented as "abc", and of course "abc" is everywhere else in the manpage as well.
thrdbndndn
6 hours ago
https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html should have all the switches with -. Filters is another story, admittedly.