Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

I built a CLI tool that lets you do common video/audio operations without remembering ffmpeg syntax.

Instead of: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos" -loop 0 output.gif

You write: ff convert video.mp4 to gif

More examples: ff compress video.mp4 to 10mb ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00 ff extract audio from video.mp4 ff resize video.mp4 to 720p ff speed up video.mp4 by 2x ff reverse video.mp4

There are similar tools that use LLMs (wtffmpeg, llmpeg, ai-ffmpeg-cli), but they require API keys, cost money, and have latency.

Ez FFmpeg is different: - No AI – just regex pattern matching - Instant – no API calls - Free – no tokens - Offline – works without internet

It handles ~20 common operations that cover 90% of what developers actually do with ffmpeg. For edge cases, you still need ffmpeg directly.

Interactive mode (just type ff) shows media files in your current folder with typeahead search.

npm install -g ezff

Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
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One that older AI struggled with was the "bounce" effect: play from 0:00 to 0:03, then backwards from 0:03 to 0:00, then repeat 5 times.

Very cool idea since ffmpeg is one of those tools that has a few common tasks but most users would need to look up the syntax every time to implement them (or make an alias). In line with the ease of use motivation, you might consider supporting tab completion.

As pessimistic about it as I am, I do think LLMs have a place in helping people turn their text description into formal directives. (Search terms, command-line, SQL, etc.)

... Provided that the user sees what's being made for them and can confirm it and (hopefully) learn the target "language."

Tutor, not a do-for-you assistant.

When converting video to gif, I always use palettegen, e.g.

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "fps=15,scale=640:-2:flags=lanczos,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=reserve_transparent=off[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=sierra2_4a" -loop 0 output.gif

See also: this blog post from 10 years ago [1]

[1] https://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html