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FFmpeg 4.3

ffmpeg.org

11–20 of 226 posts

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#11
post #7

Can someone explain to me how FFmpeg seems to be the only open-source software to do even just basic functionality with audio. I was looking at getting the sound wave graph for a piece of audio a while ago, and not only was FFmpeg the only option I found to be able to do it, it was amazingly fast and also free.

I don't know much, but isn't Audacity a thing?

Audacity is a great GUI for working with audio files. I would think it has a way to export a graph of the wave that it shows you when you open up an audio file.

You can install an FFMPEG plugin for Audacity if you need broader support of audio formats (either import or export).

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#12

Can someone explain to me how FFmpeg seems to be the only open-source software to do even just basic functionality with audio. I was looking at getting the sound wave graph for a piece of audio a while ago, and not only was FFmpeg the only option I found to be able to do it, it was amazingly fast and also free.

In addition to what others have said, there's also gstreamer and its suite of plugins. I find gstreamer a bit easier to work with, although both are very complex pieces of software and each have their own quirks.

If you're looking for audio production work, there's Ardour, although I haven't used it myself. http://ardour.org/

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#13

ffmpeg is amazing, but it’s like tar on steroids: I can never remember the right incantation. Google is required for even the simplest of things. I don’t know if it’s their goal, but I’d love a more user friendly set of command line arguments.

I think gstreamer's gst-launch syntax is a bit easier to read and write, although it has a different set of capabilities than ffmpeg, so may not be a whole replacement for what you want to do.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#14

ffmpeg is amazing, but it’s like tar on steroids: I can never remember the right incantation. Google is required for even the simplest of things. I don’t know if it’s their goal, but I’d love a more user friendly set of command line arguments.

It's fine for simple transcoding jobs. Once it reaches certain complexity you at the very minimum want to outsource it to a shell script to organize the arguments in multiple lines or switch to some other language bindings that aren't limited by shell argument parsing.

Compare the CLI and python invocation in this example: https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python#complex-filter-gr...

For some subsets of ffmpeg functionality (e.g. creating webm videos from other sources) there also are dedicated GUIs.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#15
post #5

Changelog: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/Changelog Seems like the big feature is Vulkan support?

Excellent summary of changes here: https://9to5linux.com/ffmpeg-4-3-released-with-vulkan-suppor...

TIL there’s a 9to5Linux. Is it new/affiliated with the other 9to5 properties?

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#16

ffmpeg is amazing, but it’s like tar on steroids: I can never remember the right incantation. Google is required for even the simplest of things. I don’t know if it’s their goal, but I’d love a more user friendly set of command line arguments.

Several years ago I was attempting to automate a very long chain of AV transformations using ffmepg and such. I distinctly remember having a dream of a green-text black window command line prompt of ffmpeg incantations and that is when I realized that I had been perhaps digging too deep.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#17
Exciting improvements I am glad to see: Intel QSV-accelerated VP9 decoding, Support AMD AMF encoder on Linux (via Vulkan)

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#18

Can someone explain to me how FFmpeg seems to be the only open-source software to do even just basic functionality with audio. I was looking at getting the sound wave graph for a piece of audio a while ago, and not only was FFmpeg the only option I found to be able to do it, it was amazingly fast and also free.

SoX is amazing. http://sox.sourceforge.net/

It’s not perfect but it’s way easier to use for audio stuff than FFmpeg is. I have a bunch of scripts I reuse that do basic stuff like high-pass, normalize, automatically trim audio files, add fade-in or fade-out, downmix to mono, and then resample / dither to the right depth and size.

It also will spit out spectrograms.

Generally when I need to record a ton of sound clips, I chop the audio up and rename it in a GUI editor similar to Audacity, and then do all the processing in SoX. I might also do a bunch of work in a DAW beforehand.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#19
ffmpeg is fantastic. I'm an iOS dev and when I put something on Github, I first record the iOS simulator with QuickTime. Then I convert the resulting .mov file with ffmpeg:

    ffmpeg -i example.mov -r 15 example.gif
Voilà, an animated gif. Quality is atrocious but it gets the message across, plus the filesize is not too big.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#20
post #12

Can someone explain to me how FFmpeg seems to be the only open-source software to do even just basic functionality with audio. I was looking at getting the sound wave graph for a piece of audio a while ago, and not only was FFmpeg the only option I found to be able to do it, it was amazingly fast and also free.

In addition to what others have said, there's also gstreamer and its suite of plugins. I find gstreamer a bit easier to work with, although both are very complex pieces of software and each have their own quirks. If you're looking for audio production work, there's Ardour, although I haven't used it myself. http://ardour.org/

Does gstreamer have a command-line interface in addition to the libraries?
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