Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

Does ffmpeg's gif processing support palette-per-frame yet? Last time I compared them (years ago, maybe not long after that blog post), this was a key benefit of gifski allowing it to get better results for the same filesize in many cases (not all, particularly small images, as the total size of the palette information can be significant).

I don’t because I trust the process to get the artifacts. Why? Because it’s easy to replicate and verify. Just like how proof works in math.

You can’t verify LLM’s output. And thus, any form of trust is faith, not rational logic.

I have a text file with some common commands, so no tools needed.

But yea ffmpeg is awesome software, one of the great oss projects imo. working with video is hellish and it makes it possible.

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 copy` by default you should be fine.

Also, hiding those footguns is likely to create more harm than it fixes. Case in point: "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 quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux.

Similarly, "ffmpeg extract audio from video.mp4" will unconditionally reencode the audio to mp3, again losing quality. The quality settings are also hardcoded and hidden from the user.

I can sympathize with ffmpeg syntax looking complicated at first glance, but the main reason for this is just that multimedia is really complicated and that some of this complexity is necessary in order to not make stupid mistakes that lose quality or waste CPU resources. I truly believe that these ffmpeg wrappers that try to make it seem overly simple (at least when it's this simple, i.e. not even exposing quality settings or differentiating between reencoding and remuxing) are more hurtful than helpful. Not only can they give worse results, but by hiding this complexity from users they also give users the wrong ideas about how multimedia works. "Abstractions" like this are exactly how beliefs like "resolution and quality are the same thing" come to be. I believe the way to go should be educating users about video formats and proper ffmpeg usage (e.g. with good cheat sheets), not by hiding complexity that really should not be hidden.

Edit: Reading through my comment again, I have to apologize for the slightly facetious opening statement, even if I quality it later on. The fact that so many ffmpeg wrappers exists is saying something about its apparent difficulty, but as I argue above, a) there are reasons for this (namely, multimedia itself just being complicated), and b) I believe there are good and bad ways to "fix" this, with oversimplified wrappers being more on the "bad" side.

For the kinds of things you’d need to reach for an LLM, there’s no way to trust that it actually generated what you actually asked for. You could ask it to write a bunch of tests, but you still need to read the tests.

It isn’t fair to say “since I don’t read the source of the libraries I install that are written by humans, I don’t need to read the output of an llm; it’s a higher level of abstraction” for two reasons:

1. Most Libraries worth using have already been proven by being used in actual projects. If you can see that a project has lots of bug fixes, you know it’s better than raw code. Most bugs don’t show up unless code gets put through its paces.

2. Actual humans have actual problems that they’re willing to solve to a high degree of fidelity. This is essentially saying that humans have both a massive context window and an even more massive ability to prioritize important things that are implicit. LLMs can’t prioritize like humans because they don’t have experiences.