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FFmpeg 4.3

ffmpeg.org

21–30 of 226 posts

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#22
post #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 func…

That example is fantastic and really illustrates why a solid API can make things so much easier for the developer.

Reading the command line I could barely tell what ffmpeg was doing. This also could mean the command line is badly designed.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#23
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Indeed it does; it's about as complex as ffmpeg, and in my opinion has a somewhat more intuitive interface for building up complicated pipelines of processing steps:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/tools/index....

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#25

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.

[deleted]

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#26
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is a "test tool" for gstreamer pipelines: gst-launch, but generally it's encouraged to run the gstreamer more as a library instead.

Example, if you have gstreamer libs installed:

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#27

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.

`ffmpeg` reminds me of `convert` from ImageMagick, it's complex because there's a lot of media formats and the command lets you do a lot things to the media as well.

I liked using WinFF a time ago for simple conversion jobs though where I didn't care too much about tweaking all the knobs.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#28
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 func…

That example is fantastic and really illustrates why a solid API can make things so much easier for the developer. Reading the command line I could barely tell what ffmpeg was doing. This also could mean the command line is badly designed.

As mentioned, splitting over multiple lines can help https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FilteringGuide#Multipleinputove...

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#29

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 hadn't even thought about SOX 'till your comment in about 10 years. And looking at the page, there hasn't been a new release since 2015.

From what I recall, it only worked on wav files back in the day, but now it supports OGG. But a lot has changed in even 5 years - does it even support MP3, as patents expired since then?

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#30

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.

If you're prepared to run ffmpeg twice (allowing it to analyze the GIF), the quality will be significantly better: https://cassidy.codes/blog/2017/04/25/ffmpeg-frames-to-gif-o...
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