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Most commonly I use ffmpeg to extract a slice of an audio or video file without re-encoding. In case it interests folks, I made a tool called ffslice to do this: https://github.com/jchook/ffslice/
does the tool snap to I-frames when slicing?
TBH it's an unfortunate side-effect sometimes as you cannot cut video or audio exactly where you want.
tldr ffmpeg
[1] https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/blob/main/pages/common/ff...
FFMpeg is one of those tools that is really quite hard to use. The sheer surface area of the possible commands and options is incredible and then there is so much arcane knowledge around the right settings. Its defaults aren't very good and lead to poor quality output in a lot of cases and you can get some really weird errors when you combine certain settings. Its an amazingly capable tool but its equipped with every…
ffmpeg has abysmal defaults. I've always been of the opinion that CLI utilities should have sane defaults useful to a majority of users. As someone who has used ffmpeg for well over a decade, I find it baffling that you have to pass so many arguments to get an even remotely usable result
i think this type of interaction is the future in lots of areas. i can imagine we replace API's completely with a single endpoint where you hit it up with a description of what you want back. like, hit up 'news.ycombinator.com/api' with "give me all the highest rated submissions over the past week about LLMs". a server side LLM translates that to SQL, executes the query, returns the results. this approach is broadly…
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ffmpeg has abysmal defaults. I've always been of the opinion that CLI utilities should have sane defaults useful to a majority of users. As someone who has used ffmpeg for well over a decade, I find it baffling that you have to pass so many arguments to get an even remotely usable result
For certain file formats, it's true (e.g. gif), but I gotta say- I use "ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4" after taking a video on mac, and it looks good and is a tiny fraction (sometimes 100x smaller) of the size.
But I'd also confirm the other comments after going through the steps for shrinking a longer screen recording to I needed a tutorial in addition to the built-in help pages to get it working.
It was a little bit fun almost to try&error my way through combinations of quality and cropping options, but sure, time consuming.
I have to say, I mostly like FFMPEGs approach. Anyone can build anything on top of it, like GUIs.
"Good" defaults can cause an explosion of complexity when providing many different options and allowing all technically feasible combinations.
There's also room for some kind of improved CLI I guess, but many possibilities always mean complex options. So this is probably easier said than done.
It does seem to have pretty good defaults in the MOV MP4 transcoding case.
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So that last one is a hallucination: there's no `n_frames` variable for the select filter: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#select_002c-aselect At the least, I learnt a lot about how FFmpeg works.
Yeah, it is crazy how confidently LLMs can say something when it has never existed. Having said that, I'm still a HUGE fan of LLMs, as I know it is very unlikely that multiple LLMs will brain fart at the same time. If you know how to navigate things, you will get a solution much faster than you probably would have in the past.
The black swan for LLM in a sense.
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does the tool snap to I-frames when slicing?
I don't know about ffslice, but you can get frame-perfect slicing with minimal reencoding via LosslessCut's experimental "smart cut" feature[2] or Smart Media Cutter's[3] smartcut[4]. [1] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut [2] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126 [3] https://smartmediacutter.com/ [4] https://github.com/skeskinen/smartcut
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it should really just have an interactive mode that supports batching. It would cover 99% of use cases. I recommend everyone ITT to just use Handbrake (a GUI) unless they have extremely niche use cases. What's the point of using a LLM? You just need one person who knows ffmpeg better than you to write a GUI. And someone did. So use that. If Handbrake doesn't solve your problem please just go to Stack Overflow. The LL…
I used RazorLame back in the day and then MediaCoder for a decade. Then I found out MediaCoder uses ffmpeg! The main thing I do with ffmpeg is make highly compatible MP4s because some devices can't handle some MP4s. ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags faststart outut.mp4 If I can make a Handbrake preset for that, it might save me a tiny bit of hassle.
Never had any issues since I switched to this particular workflow. Vegas (and I presume most editing software) is particularly anal about formats, especially when you need real time previews.
You can always add some extra command line options if you need to. It's just much easier to work with a GUI when the system is as complex as ffmpeg.