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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

#131

Post by leephillips »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #90
hnarn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people just want to use a tool to do a job swiftly. Not everything has to be educational. > some folks want to use lossless cut In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are: > "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing qu…

As the other person said (and this is my mistake for not capitalizing), Lossless Cut is a popular CLI wrapper for ffmpeg with a (somewhat) intuitive interface. Someone is going to be able to pick up and use that a lot faster than they are ffmpeg. I think a lot of folks forget how daunting most people find using a terminal, yet a lot of those people still want something to do a simple lossless trim of an existing vide…

Looks like a GUI wrapper in fact, no?

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

#132

Post by lukeschlather »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #95
chpatrick wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because FFmpeg is a swiss army knife with a million blades and I don't think any easy interface is really going to do the job well. It's a great LLM use case.

I know everybody uses a subscription for these things, but doesn't it at least feel expensive to use an LLM like this? Like turning on the oven to heat up a single slice of pizza.

No, LLMs are extremely useful for dealing with ffmpeg. Also I don't think they're sufficient, they get confused too easily and ffmpeg is extremely confusing.

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

#133

Post by Forgeties79 »

leephillips wrote: post #131
Forgeties79 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other person said (and this is my mistake for not capitalizing), Lossless Cut is a popular CLI wrapper for ffmpeg with a (somewhat) intuitive interface. Someone is going to be able to pick up and use that a lot faster than they are ffmpeg. I think a lot of folks forget how daunting most people find using a terminal, yet a lot of those people still want something to do a simple lossless trim of an existing vide…

Looks like a GUI wrapper in fact, no?

Yes thank you I can get a little clumsy with my acronyms. Downside of not being a proper coder/engineer!

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

#134

Post by leephillips »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #133
leephillips wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a GUI wrapper in fact, no?

Yes thank you I can get a little clumsy with my acronyms. Downside of not being a proper coder/engineer!

No problem. I only asked because if there were a CLI version I wanted to know about it.

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

#135

Post by dceddia »

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

In many cases today “gif” is a misnomer anyway and mp4 is a better choice. Not always, not everywhere supports actual video.

But one case I see often: If you’re making a website with an animated gif that’s actually a .gif file, try it as an mp4 - smaller, smoother, proper colors, can still autoplay fine.

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

#136

Post by mhuffman »

qbow883 wrote: post #57

Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0 It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well. Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c co…

>It's really not that hard

It is only a couple of thousand options[0], just memorize them! It super simple, barely an inconvenience!

[0]https://gist.github.com/tayvano/6e2d456a9897f55025e25035478a...

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

#137

Post by MattDaEskimo »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #103
qbow883 wrote: post #57

Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0 It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well. Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c co…

> It's really not that hard, I've learned not to say this. Different things are easy/hard for each of us. Reminds me of a discussion where someone argued, "why don't all the poor/homeless people just go get good jobs?" Edit: I know your comment was meant to inspire/motivate us to try harder. Maybe it's easier than it appears.

I would agree with this statement before LLMs. Reading manuals can take time, be messy, and are sometimes hard to understand.

Now, I can simply ask any LLM to write the command, and understand any following issues or questions.

For example, my OS records videos as WEBM. Using the default settings for transforming to MP4 usually fails from a resolution ratio issue. I would be deadlocked using this library.

It really isn't that hard anymore.

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

#140

Post by ubercow13 »

qbow883 wrote: post #57

Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0 It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well. Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c co…

Totally disagree, I have a wrapper I wrote myself for converting things, often for sharing the odd little clip online or such. It produces a complex command that is not easy to just type out, that does multiple things to maximise compatibility like

- making sure pixel are square while resizing if the video resolution is too large

    ("scale=w=if(gt(iw*sar\\,ih)\\,min(ceil(iw*sar/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(iw*sar*min(ih\\,{})/ih/2)*2):h=if(gt(ih\\,iw*sar)\\,min(ceil(ih/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(ih*min(iw*sar\\,{})/iw/sar/2)\*2):out_range=limited,zscale,setsar=1")
- dealing with some HDR or high gamut thing I can't really remember that can result from screen recording on macos using some method I was using at some point

- setting this one tag on hevc files that macos needs for them to be recognised as hevc but isn't set by default

- calculating the target bitrate if I need a specific filesize and verifying the encode actually hit that size and retrying if not (doesn't always work first time with certain hardware encoders even if they have a target or max bitrate parameter)

- dealing with 2-pass encoding which is fiddly and requires two separate commands and the parameters are codec specific

- correctly activating hardware encoding for various codecs

- etc

And this is just for the basic task of "make this into a simple mp4"

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