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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

#41

Post by Marazan »

madeofpalk wrote: post #38
corobo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are an amazing advance in natural language parsing. The problem is someone decided that and the contents of Wikipedia was all something needs to be intelligent haha

The confusion was thinking that language is the same thing as intelligence.

This seems like a glib one liner but I do think it is profoundly insightful as to how some people approach thinking about LLMs.

It is almost like there is hardwiring in our brains that makes us instinctively correlate language generation with intelligence and people cannot separate the two.

It would be like if for the first calculators ever produced instead of responding with 8 to the input 4 + 4 = printed out "Great question! The answer to your question is 7.98" and that resulted in a slew of people proclaiming the arrival of AGI (or, more seriously, the ELIZA Effect is a thing).

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

#43

Post by ramigb »

That's beautiful! I see a .claude folder in your code, I am curious if you've "vibecoded" the whole project or just had claude there for some tasks! not that it matters or takes away from your work but just pure curiosity as someone who enjoys betting on the LLM output XD

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

#44

Post by rolfus »

left-struck wrote: post #19
Terr_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. I have a bunch of little command-line apps that I use 0.3 to 3 times a year* and I'm never going to memorize the commands or syntax for those. I'll be happy to remember the names of these tools, so I can actually find them on my own computer.

* - Just a few days ago I used ImageMagick for the first time in at least three years. I downloaded it just to find that I already had it installed.

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

#45

Post by geysersam »

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 getting 90% might not be good enough, and the effort you need to expend to reach 97% costs much more than the energy the GPU uses.

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

#47

Post by andrewf »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #4

I was surprised that macOS (QuickTime/Preview, iMovie) can't read .mp4 files. Not sure if it was due to H.265 or the audio codec. I tried using ffmpeg to convert to .mov but that also failed to open, since I guess MOV is just another container format. Is there an easier way?

Try something like: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v h264 -c:a aac out.mp4

To re-encode the content into H.264+AAC, rather than simply "muxing" the encoded bitstreams from the MP4 container into a new MOV container.

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

#48

Post by crazysim »

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

Gifski (https://gif.ski/) might be a good alternative to look to that's gif-pallete aware.

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

#49

Post by famahar »

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.

Do most devs even look at the source code for packages they install? Or the compiled machine code? I think of this as just a higher level of abstraction. Confirm it works and not worry about the details of how it works

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

#50

Post by RadiozRadioz »

pixelpoet wrote: post #27
beepbooptheory wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Requiring the installation of a massive kraken like node.js and npm to run a commandline executable hardly screams efficiency...

That's a deficiency with this particular implementation, not an inherent disadvantage to the method
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