All Ive ever wanted was to convert mp4 to gif.
Why?
What's more confounding about this than translating between any other two formats?
Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#72Related: I have a small library of personal videos, including from my wedding, and I'd like to compress it as much as I can to reduce its storage footprint. I don't care much about codec compatibility, as long as I can watch them on my (ARM) MacBook, it's good. In the past (over 10 years ago), I used to work with H.264, but I remember fiddling with parameters was a pain. I wonder if nowadays there are some promising…
I'd recommend not re-encoding as you'll have irrevocably lost data. Whatever it's size, in the future it won't be large.
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#73As someone who uses ffmpeg daily (mostly basic functions), I now rely on chatGPT to approximate the command and fine tune from there. Haven't used too many of the advanced features of ffmpeg so glad someone seems to be covering those use cases as most tutorials dont cover them.
I had a whole folder of videos I wanted to convert to 720p, asked chatGPT and it gave me this:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "" -exec sh -c 'pv "$1" | ffmpeg -i pipe:0 -filter:v scale=720:-2 -c:a copy "${1%.}.mp4" 2> /dev/null' _ {} \;
Not sure if it can be improved but it works well
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#74Since ffmpeg CLI still makes me pull my hair out, even with excellent guides, I am going to plug vapoursynth: https://www.vapoursynth.com/ Its optimized Pythonic video filtering... But also so much more: https://vsdb.top/ And Staxrip, which makes such good use of ffmpeg, vapoursynth, and dozens of other encoders and tools that I reboot from linux to Windows just to use it: https://github.com/staxrip/staxrip
I would really appreciate just an ffmpeg wrapper with better CLI. It is unnecessarily convoluted, and while I don't know if there's a point of view from which it actually all makes sense, it is just inadequate in performing all sorts of extremely common tasks it is perfectly able to perform, if one knows which magic words it needs to hear. I probably have dozens of bash-aliases, that are nothing more than encoding 15…
>> I would really appreciate just an ffmpeg wrapper with better CLI.
There were (are?) tons of them on GitHub. But many are still obscure, or are single dev efforts that fizzled out.
Some focused, purpose built CLI frontends (like Av1an, specifically for transcoding) are excellent at what they do. Perhaps that is the better way than an all encompassing wrapper.
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#75People like to say that ffmpeg is complicated but when you make it into a nice gui it doesn't get any easier -- it is video compression itself that is complicated. No software could make it easier without making the decisions for you, like handbrake or some other click-through interface. I'm not certain, but I highly suspect that if I sat down and learned about digital video encoding and compression on a granular eno…
I've written DirectShow filters around 17 years back for WindowsMobile (not Windows Phone) so I've a decent understanding of codecs and containers.
Formats like mkv or codecs like HEVC didn't exist back then but the concept of manipulating audio/video through a bunch of filters is a wonderful one and most (all?) a/v transforming software does it. When I started looking into FFmpeg's man pages I could connect the dots and start using it after a day of fooling around.
I'm a CLI lover and man page reader so perhaps it worked to my advantage.
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#76[flagged]
You and the developers you know don't encompass all of humanity.
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. For the first startup that I worked for, I earned a position with budgeting authority. Once we achieved profitably, I added donations to the open source tools we relied upon. I received some pushback and defended it. Looking back, I am proud of that choice. I encourage you all to do the same.
Can you share what you chose as your points and what convinced them at the end?
What likely works better in conservative environments, are not donations, but (generous) support contracts. This is something buisness people can understand.
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#78All Ive ever wanted was to convert mp4 to gif.
You can do that with ffmpeg, but the output isn't ideal
I'd use gifski: https://gif.ski/
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#79I was looking for a ffmpeg UI recently and came across Shutter Encoder. It's open source, mac/windows, very good software.
I've finally started compressing my 15 year, 300GB personal video collection..
https://www.shutterencoder.com/
I'm compressing everything using, H.265 and videos are shrinking to sometimes 1/10th the size.. Is there who would give me reasons why I would not want to do this? I've read that it takes more processing power to watch these compressed videos, but not sure that will cause much trouble in the future...
Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier
#80A bit off topic, IMO ffmpeg is one of the best software ever written. Fabian Fabrice (ff) is one talented engineer and people such as him are a gift to the FOSS community. I used to work in a ~2 bil unicorn in which a big part of the products we worked on relied on ffmpeg.
And you gave a sizable donation, right? https://ffmpeg.org/donations.html
How about you just give a donation for all three of us?