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Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

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Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#11

Post by eviks »

Terr_ wrote: post #7
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

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.

The "provided" isn't provided, of course, especially the learning part, that's not what you'd turn to AI for vs more reliable tutoring alternatives

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#13

Post by CrossVR »

dllu wrote: post #9

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

I've been thinking of integrating pngquant as an ffmpeg filter, it would make it possible to generate even better pallettes. That would get ffmpeg on par with gifski.

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#14

Post by beepbooptheory »

HelloUsername wrote: post #2

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

But doesnt something like this interface kind of show the inefficiency of this? Like we can all agree ffmpeg is somewhat esoteric and LLMs are probably really great at it, but at the end of the day if you can get 90% of what you need with just some good porcelain, why waste the energy spinning up the GPU?

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#16

Post by imiric »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #14
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

But doesnt something like this interface kind of show the inefficiency of this? Like we can all agree ffmpeg is somewhat esoteric and LLMs are probably really great at it, but at the end of the day if you can get 90% of what you need with just some good porcelain, why waste the energy spinning up the GPU?

Because the porcelain is purpose built for a specific use case. If you need something outside of what its author intended, you'll need to get your hands dirty.

And, realistically, compute and power is cheap for getting help with one-off CLI commands.

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#17

Post by bdbdbdb »

Sometimes an idea comes along thats so obvious it makes me angry. I have been struggling with ffmpeg commands for over well a decade. All the time I wasted googling and creating scripts so I wouldn't have to regoogle and this could have existed literally from day one

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#18

Post by my_brain_saying »

eviks wrote: post #12

That's the problem ideally solved by typed data, i.e., some UI where instead of trying to memorize whether it's thumb/s/nails you can read the closed list of alternatives, read contextual help and pick one

This is why we have fish tab completions. Does exactly that; list of possible commands with contextual help. Fish rules.

Re: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

#19

Post by left-struck »

Terr_ wrote: post #7
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

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.

I agree apart from the learning part. The thing is unless you have some very specific needs where you need to use ffmpeg a lot, there’s just no need to learn this stuff. If I have to touch it once a year I have much better things to spend my time learning than ffmpeg command
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