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FFmpeg 4.3

ffmpeg.org

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Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#51

Post by darzu »

crazygringo wrote: post #43
tambourine_man wrote: post #9

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.

This is where GUI's shine, as opposed to command-line. Perhaps this is slightly off-topic, but my dream is an interface that combines the best of both worlds. Kind of an automated GUI-builder for command-line tools, that analyzes the combinations of options used most, breaks them down into workflows with options (that can be manually named), and you can thus execute one-off commands easily and quickly without having…

This sounds great! Expanding on this a little:

Seems like you'd need a universal CLI tool usage traverser and parser to figure out what's possible. Likely this would produce a decision tree of sorts with different modes and options excluding or including new options. We'd need a way to show all this, maybe nested tabs for modes and check boxes and other inputs at each appropriate level.

Layer on this a way to optimize for the most common cases like you said. Further, if this becomes popular, CLI tools could emit some sort of standard description language that would optionally customize the GUI. The GUI's output should be both the text command it constructed and the ability to run that command directly.

More future steps would be a way to reason about multiple commands, pipes, and other combinators.

Adding this to my side projects backlog. Thanks for the idea!

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#52

Post by nneonneo »

vanderZwan wrote: post #48
umaar wrote: post #37

As a little side project, I've been trying to automate creation of those "1 second everyday" style videos [1], and used FFmpeg to achieve this. For things like trimming and concatenating videos, one thing that surprised me was that it was slower than using a tool like ScreenFlow. Note, we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes worth of 4K videos. slower = When I say slower, I mean, if I manually performed the same op…

> "1 second everyday" style videos Tangent: you reminded me of one of the coolest auditory experiences I've ever had. Roughly one-and-a-half decades ago I attended a public lecture by Olivier Nijs, a sound design guy from my region[0], about how he built an automated set-up from an old desktop to record one second of 7:00 in the morning every day. Then he manually cut together one whole year. The amazing thing about…

Not being able to read Dutch, do you happen to have a direct link to the lecture or the recording he made?

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#53

Post by gattr »

And here's my incantation for screen recording under X Window (also used one like it under MS Windows, but I don't have it on hand):

  ffmpeg -rtbufsize 2147M -f x11grab -video_size 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -r 30 -preset ultrafast -vcodec h264 output.mp4

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#54

Post by umaar »

vanderZwan wrote: post #48
umaar wrote: post #37

As a little side project, I've been trying to automate creation of those "1 second everyday" style videos [1], and used FFmpeg to achieve this. For things like trimming and concatenating videos, one thing that surprised me was that it was slower than using a tool like ScreenFlow. Note, we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes worth of 4K videos. slower = When I say slower, I mean, if I manually performed the same op…

> "1 second everyday" style videos Tangent: you reminded me of one of the coolest auditory experiences I've ever had. Roughly one-and-a-half decades ago I attended a public lecture by Olivier Nijs, a sound design guy from my region[0], about how he built an automated set-up from an old desktop to record one second of 7:00 in the morning every day. Then he manually cut together one whole year. The amazing thing about…

Sounds fascinating, stuff like that interests me a lot. Hope that video surfaces one day, would really like to see it.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#55

Post by nine_k »

tbran wrote: post #47

I wanted to create a slideshow a couple weeks ago and came across this article [0] on creating a Ken Burns Effect Slideshow. Very cool and is a great demo of some of ffmpeg's functionality. However, the final command is a little crazy: ffmpeg -i 1.jpg -i 2.jpg -i 3.jpg -filter_complex "color=c=black:r=60:size=1280x800:d=10[black];[0:v]format=pix_fmts=yuva420p,crop=w=2*floor(iw/2):h=2*floor(ih/2),zoompan=z='if(eq(on,1…

If you read the post by the link, each of these settings (or rather groups thereof) look reasonable and readabale in isolation.

This demonstrates, in a rather extreme example, the colossal composability of the interface, even if it lacks nice formatting here.

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#56

Post by cerberusss »

izacus wrote: post #30
cerberusss wrote: post #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.

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...

Great tip, thanks!

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#57

Post by ravenstine »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #27
tambourine_man wrote: post #9

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.

Is WinFF still around in some capacity? The website doesn't load for me. Too bad if it's abandoned, because I remember it being pretty amazing.

EDIT: From Big Matt's blog:

> Unfortunately I lost the WinFf.org domain. I was broke but I don't think it's that important after all these many years. You can still go to github, video help, and others.

https://www.biggmatt.com/2020/04/winfforg.html

Re: FFmpeg 4.3

#59

Post by crispyambulance »

tbran wrote: post #47

I wanted to create a slideshow a couple weeks ago and came across this article [0] on creating a Ken Burns Effect Slideshow. Very cool and is a great demo of some of ffmpeg's functionality. However, the final command is a little crazy: ffmpeg -i 1.jpg -i 2.jpg -i 3.jpg -filter_complex "color=c=black:r=60:size=1280x800:d=10[black];[0:v]format=pix_fmts=yuva420p,crop=w=2*floor(iw/2):h=2*floor(ih/2),zoompan=z='if(eq(on,1…

FFmpeg is infamous for absurdly complex command options. It's really too much for a "one-liner" CLI.

When I use it, I just look for "pre-baked recipes" otherwise it's a really unpleasant rabbit hole to get into.

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