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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

#191

Post by jayd16 »

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 not hard, but it's one of those tools where the user has to think about how the tool is implemented.

Even if the abstractions get leaky, people yern for goal/workflow oriented UX.

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

#192

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

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…

Here I was trusting my own experience. Silly me. I should’ve been listening to some HN user’s assertion as to what is “easy” and “hard”.

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

#193

Post by troupo »

phil294 wrote: post #111

I like it and would like to see an entire Linux OS being done in a similar manner. Or shell / wrapper / whatever. A sane homogeneous cli for once, that treats its user as a human instead of forcing them to remember the incompatible invocation options of `tar` and `dd` for absolutely no reason. zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9 write my-iso ./zip.zip onto external hard drive git delete commit 1a4d…

> One can dream

That was the promise of COBOL. And SQL. And AppleScript. And ABAP. And...

It never works out the way you want it.

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

#194

Post by pathartl »

crazygringo wrote: post #144
ninalanyon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really not that hard, if you are doing it often that's true. But for people like me who do it once every month or two it really is hard to memorize, especially if it's not exactly the same task. What I would love would be an interactive script that asked me what I was trying to do and constructed a command line for me while explaining what it would do and the meaning of each argument. And of course it should f…

I swear I want this as a general tool for all command-line tools. Start the tool, and just list all of the options in order of usage popularity to toggle on as desired, with a brief explanation, and a field to paste in arguments like filenames or values when needed. If an option is commonly used with another (or requires it), provide those hints (or automatically add the necessary values). If a value itself has struc…

The problem is always going to be that everyone has their own way of structuring arguments and providing help text. You could probably do it with PowerShell.

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

#195

Post by memset »

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…

Isn’t this the nature of all software abstractions? They often introduce a less performant way of executing a task at the tradeoff of user convenience?

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

#196

Post by agentifysh »

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…

well if i follow your logic then assembly looks complicated at first glance and if people spent more time and effort they could get used to it.

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

#197

Post by kiicia »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #89
kiicia wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP4 is container, not format, so if you have unsupported format packed into MP4 container it won’t be played. Example is trying to play AV1 video codec on devices with M2 chip or older. It won’t play. But it will play on devices with M3 chip and newer. Easiest solution is to use other player so that you can watch any MP4 file but with software decoding where hardware decoding is not available. Examples of such player…

Yes, VLC works fine for playing. The user wanted to edit some mp4 videos with iMovie (vs ffmpeg). I think it was an M4 Mac. Does iMovie need a codec pack? I know some PC OEMs don't ship an h.265 codec, pointing users to a $0.99 download. Thought Mac would include it, being aimed at content creators. Hoping for a cheaper solution than Adobe Premiere.

H265 is different codec, and exactly because of that license fee both VP9 and AV1 exist. Apple was hiding VP9 support for long time now and AV1 support is now official.

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

#198

Post by guntis_dev »

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…

I think there's a reason these wrappers keep appearing - different tools for different use cases. Not everyone needs to become an ffmpeg expert, especially if they only need it occasionally.

For example this one is also ffmpeg wrapper, https://lorem.video and built for devs and QAs who just need a quick placeholder video without diving into ffmpeg syntax. It's optimized for that narrow use case to generate test video by typing a URL.

Nothing wrong with learning ffmpeg properly if you use it regularly, but purpose built tools have their place too.

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

#200

Post by imglorp »

Sometimes English is not swell as a specification format.

> ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00

Does this mean I keep the indicated section or does it mean I throw it away?

And many other examples of English sucking at ambiguity when precision matters. Maybe this is a corollary of " naming things is hard ".

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