Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

vidmix.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#21

Post by pjc50 »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #20

I recently used Gemini to help with some dashcam videos that weren't being saved properly. I was sure most of the data were there but the files wouldn't play in VLC or MPC, so I asked Gemini. It suggested various things to try, and after pasting in the error messages each time it suggested more and more radical things. Eventually it suggested a program called Untrunc, where you give it a working video file as a refer…

Interesting - I took a look at how this works and why it needs a reference, and the answer is the usual one of the 'moov atom': a critical piece of metadata. Lots of programs output it at the end of the file, but that makes it vulnerable to truncation, and for streaming it's useful to move it to the beginning of the file. ffmpeg refers to this as "fast start".

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#25

Post by kkukshtel »

To yes, and this —

I've started doing something similar on the command line with Claude Code that works incredibly well:

claude -p "use ffmpeg to convert myvideo.mov into an h264 video suitable for youtube upload" --dangerously-skip-permissions

Highly recommended! I use --dangerously-skip-permissions because I just want to set it and forget it and dont need to babysit the run.

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#26

Post by madeofpalk »

orderone_ai wrote: post #2

This is such a convenient tool for a casual user, and a great application of an LLM to a narrow task that probably couldn't be handled quite so easily everywhere. Also a great example of the emerging 'chat driven' UX trend, which I'm really liking.

I think it's amusing how the most consistent usecase for "LLM for CLI" is to use ffmpeg.

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#28

Post by jjbinx007 »

pjc50 wrote: post #21
jjbinx007 wrote: post #20

I recently used Gemini to help with some dashcam videos that weren't being saved properly. I was sure most of the data were there but the files wouldn't play in VLC or MPC, so I asked Gemini. It suggested various things to try, and after pasting in the error messages each time it suggested more and more radical things. Eventually it suggested a program called Untrunc, where you give it a working video file as a refer…

Interesting - I took a look at how this works and why it needs a reference, and the answer is the usual one of the 'moov atom': a critical piece of metadata. Lots of programs output it at the end of the file, but that makes it vulnerable to truncation, and for streaming it's useful to move it to the beginning of the file. ffmpeg refers to this as "fast start".

That makes sense, thanks for that

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#29

Post by victorbjorklund »

danielvaughn wrote: post #4

I tried to implement something very similar recently, and had the hardest time getting the LLM to produce anything remotely resembling actual ffmpeg commands.

Which model did you use? Claude has been spot on for all my needs.

Re: Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

#30

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

toddmorey wrote: post #6

The Warp terminal[1] is excellent for this type of thing. In agent mode, you just describe what you want to have happen and it generates the proper command(s) (that you can approve before running). I use it a lot to convert videos and turn a folder of tiff files into pngs at 1/2 size, etc. It's great at generating FFMEG commands and chaining the right tools together. [1] https://www.warp.dev

Also in zed you can hit ctl-enter in terminal or in code and get the same
Post reply on HN