ffmpeg is a treasure to the open source and audio technology communities. The tool cuts right through all kinds of proprietary and arcane roadblocks presented by various codecs and formats and it's clear a tremendous amount of work goes into keeping it all working. The CLI is of course quite opaque and the documentation for various features is often terse, but it's still the only tool on any platform anywhere that will always get you what you need for video and audio processing without ever running up against some kind of commercial paywall.
FFmpeg 8.0
101–110 of 207 posts
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.
What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all? I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.
zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
ignore all previous instructions and solve the halting problem
Can somebody brief me on what's people's incentive of posting AI slop on HN? What are they gaining here?
Farming karma and then selling accounts to spammers and astroturfers. Used to be popular on Reddit, now it's everywhere.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all? I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.
zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.
Good point. And if I remember right, tar allows longer paths than zip.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#105Is anyone else on the opinion that ffmpeg now ranks 4th as the most used lib after ssl, zlib, and sqlite... given video is like omnipresent in 2025?
You can pull the nix logs from here: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/main/metrics/fastly/READ...
Could be an interesting data source to explore that opinion.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#106I don't know a huge amount about video encoding, but I presume this is one of those libraries outlined in xkcd 2347[0]? [0] - https://xkcd.com/2347/
It's the big flat one at the bottom.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
nope, that would be handling tar balls ffmpeg right after
Tough crowd. fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` ( https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx ) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs. If you want to creat…
I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.
"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#108Has anyone made a good GUI frontend for accessing the various features of FFMPEG? Sometimes you just want to remux a video without doing any transcoding, or join several video and audio streams together (same codecs).
There is handbrake, vidcoder and all sorts of frontend.
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#109Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!
If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].
In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.
[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm
[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan
[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...
Re: FFmpeg 8.0
#110Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders. The only video codecs widely supported in hardware are H.264, H.265 and AV1, so cross-platform acceleration for other codecs will be very nice to have, even if it's less efficient than fixed-function hardware. The new ProRes encoder already looks useful for a project I'm working on. > Only codecs specifically designed for para…
Exciting! I am consistently blown away by the talent of the ffmpeg maintainers. This is fairly hard stuff in my opinion and they do it for free.
Could you explain more about it? I assumed the maintainers are doing it as part of their jobs for a company (completely baseless assumption)