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Has 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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls. The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list. That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish. Examples: tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x You never need anything else for the 99% case.
The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.
Has 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).
I 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/
Yeah, basically anytime a video or audio is being recorded, played, or streamed its from ffmpeg. It runs on a couple planets [0], and on most devices (maybe?) [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9
That being said, if you put down a pie chart of media frameworks (especially for transcoding or muxing), ffmpeg would have a significant share of that pie.
Is 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?
Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool. I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)
LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic… It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.
If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.
Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool. I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)
LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic… It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.
A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.
The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.
Linking a previous discussion to FFMPEG's inclusion of whisper in this release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647 This seemed to be interesting to users of this site. tl;dr they added support for whisper, an OpenAI model for speech-to-text, which should allow autogeneration of captions via ffmpeg
these days most movies and series already come out with captions, but you know what does not, given the vast amount of it?... ;) yep, finally the deaf will able to read what people are saying in a porno!
This could streamline things
I 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 exceedingly good software though, and to be fair I think it’s gotten a fair bit of sponsorship and corporate support.