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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

#181

Post by plufz »

qbow883 wrote: post #142
ubercow13 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Yes, absolutely. Multimedia is complicated. But my issue with the linked tool is that it does none of the things you mentioned. All it does it make already very easy things even easier. Is it really that much harder to remember `ffmpeg -i inputfile outputfile.ext` than `ff convert inputfile to ext`? I've explained this in other replies here but I am neither saying that ffmpeg wrappers are automatically bad, nor that…

> Multimedia is complicated.

I mean you saw the code above? It looks like gibberish and regex had a child. Many things in computing are complicated, but doesn’t look like that code. I make my living in media related programming and the code above is messy and extremely hard to read.

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

#182

Post by russfink »

MattDaEskimo wrote: post #137
Tempest1981 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Except what if you don’t really grok those ffmpeg flags and the LLM tells you something wrong - how will you know? Or more common, send you down a re-encode rabbit hole when you just needed a simple clipping off the end?

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

#183

Post by stevage »

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, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.

Not that hard for you maybe. These things are not universal. You might wish to reconsider your basic assumption that everyone is too lazy to do this easy thing.

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

#184

Post by stevage »

MattDaEskimo wrote: post #137
Tempest1981 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I sometimes use LLMs to generate commands, and it generally works. But a common issue is that it throws in extra options because they are very commonly used - even if they're not necessary or relevant to my actual situation. So if you don't go through and check them all, you get this kind of unchecked cruft in your scripts that may later cause a problem.

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

#186

Post by foundart »

The github repo link from the npm page doesn't work, so I guess the author had second thoughts.

I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today, or rather Gemini and Claude were fighting it. Task: create a video that is a pan across a photo, followed by a scale/zoom.

Probably easy for some people, but I had no clue and the LLMs weren't doing that well either. Things took a turn for the better when I asked Gemini for an alternative tool.

The answer was Vapoursynth - https://www.vapoursynth.com/doc/introduction.html#introducti...

Again, the LLM did the work, but it was able to do so. Since Vapoursynth is driven by python scripts (though with the extension .vpy), it was easy for me to make adjustments.

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

#188

Post by tombert »

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…

Yeah, a decade or so ago, I was constantly looking for GUIs to drive ffmpeg, but eventually I kind of realized I was spending more time playing with GUIs compared to just learning the basics of ffmpeg.

I will admit that I still do need to occasionally look up specific stuff, but for the most part I can do most of the common cases from memory.

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

#189

Post by Dylan16807 »

christstopit wrote: post #116
qbow883 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really sure how else I was supposed to interpret your comment Yes, that was a bit facetious of me, I apologize for that. > What is so bad about the existence of this project? Being very blunt: The fact that it reinforces the extremely common misconception that a) converting between containers like mkv and mp4 will always require reencoding and that b) there is a single way to reencode a video (hence suggesting…

You are overthinking this way too much, to the point that it is sounding like you are purposefully creating out-of-context problems to justify your way too long rant. As the kids these days say: just take the L, man.

I completely disagree. The rant is a problem but the complaint about reencoding is quite valid.

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

#190

Post by dev1ycan »

FFMPEG is so goddamn cool, I was doing a mod for warcraft 3 where I restore the original Frozen Throne UI and one (especially useful before, Blizzard now restored the classic WEBM models so that part is now outdated but the blue buttons and other stuff are still relevant).

And virtually every method was failing in decoloring the "chains".webm video that Reforged has on the bottom corners (by default it has a very rusty feeling that fits reign of chaos more than the frozen throne)... but FFMPEG via commands did it perfectly fine, extremely easily by doing it frame by frame, actually incredible that this software is completely free.

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