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Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

amiaopensource.github.io

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#81

Related: 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…

This depends on how much time you want to spend. If you want the transcode to take less time than the playtime of your videos, it'll probably be best to just use the best hardware encoder you have with high quality settings.

If you have more time, then AV1 is good. Read through the trac page [1] and do test encodes with 5-10 seconds of video to determine what settings give you your desired quality. Note that low `-cpu-used` or `-preset` values will give great quality but take incredibly long. Then, encode a few minutes of video with various settings to determine what settings give you your desired file size.

For human time usage, keep track of the commands and options you use and how those affect the output. If the job will take more than a few hours, write your script to be cancellable and resumable.

[1]: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, this goes w/o question, but not all F/OSS projects are incorporated and/or can provide a contract. Even more trouble if the entities are in yhe different countries.

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I'm sure you are right, I can't help but to be irked by this strange environment we live in where we have to treat business people like infants who need things mashed and mushed into something they can digest and understand.

Nobody had to explain to me the concept of donating to support somebody working on something my business relies on, it's just common sense.

If I was really reliant on books documenting tolls and laws in regards to international trades, and you wanted to give a donation to support this work, I wouldn't be all "me no understand, please explain it in programmer-speak for me".

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#84
post #49

Earlier 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?

One argument I made was sponsoring a project, especially buys you support / developer relations. For example, we replaced a commercial PKZIP license with 7-zip. Was able to use the fact that one of the project we donated to, 7-zip, implemented a feature request that helped in this transition. That combined with the fact that these donations relative to our proprietary software costs were insignificant, made it an easy sell to my boss.

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#85
post #72

Related: 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.

Yea can get wonky, -c:v copy is the correct flag to not re-encode

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#86

A 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.

Fabian Fabrice has created many amazing software projects.

Comparable only to famous film director Alan Smithee who has credit for so many films.

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#87
post #79

I 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 take…

I tried this automated across a large video collection and the quality was subpar because my CRV settings were weak despite looking fine on the test videos. Consider that a word of warning, validate many videos before removing the masters.

But with 300gb, storage is cheap enough that you could just keep the masters.

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#89
post #17
post #12

[flagged]

Conversely, I do not know any developers that use AI instead of google. And considering the horrific garbage it has given me the few times I tried, I’d be worried about what you’re doing with it.

I do use ChatGPT, and while it helped me with things like obscure issues with bash syntax, it hallucinated some CLI tools options often enough that I never trust it with anything important. (And I tried to ask it even fairly easy questions.)

While it works pretty well when I forget some CLI tool option, in cases when some tool does not have an option doing what I want, ChatGPT is worse than useless - instead of telling me that it doesn't know an option doing something exists, it just tries to "think something up".

In the world when the right answer is "no, there is no option doing what you want" even a small amount of time, ChatGPT is actively harmful.

Re: Ffmprovisr – Making FFmpeg Easier

#90
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What likely works better in conservative environments, are not donations, but (generous) support contracts. This is something buisness people can understand.

While I'm sure you are right, I can't help but to be irked by this strange environment we live in where we have to treat business people like infants who need things mashed and mushed into something they can digest and understand. Nobody had to explain to me the concept of donating to support somebody working on something my business relies on, it's just common sense. If I was really reliant on books documenting toll…

If you relied on a set of books and found out the author and publisher were head of the 'Defund STEM; Make Everyone Get Lit Degrees (DSMEGLD, prounced De-smegol'd, cause they are LOTR nerds)' lobbying organization and actively spent a good portion of their day convincing education organizations from kindergartens to Universities remove all their math, science, and programming classes and teach crystal healing instead, would you donate to them?

You love programming and wouldn't help a group of people try to destroy it, right>

Well, business people love money and don't want to help people not give it to them or not let them keep it.

(toungue in cheek but 60% serious...)

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