Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0

It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.

Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c copy` by default you should be fine.

Also, hiding those footguns is likely to create more harm than it fixes. Case in point: "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux.

Similarly, "ffmpeg extract audio from video.mp4" will unconditionally reencode the audio to mp3, again losing quality. The quality settings are also hardcoded and hidden from the user.

I can sympathize with ffmpeg syntax looking complicated at first glance, but the main reason for this is just that multimedia is really complicated and that some of this complexity is necessary in order to not make stupid mistakes that lose quality or waste CPU resources. I truly believe that these ffmpeg wrappers that try to make it seem overly simple (at least when it's this simple, i.e. not even exposing quality settings or differentiating between reencoding and remuxing) are more hurtful than helpful. Not only can they give worse results, but by hiding this complexity from users they also give users the wrong ideas about how multimedia works. "Abstractions" like this are exactly how beliefs like "resolution and quality are the same thing" come to be. I believe the way to go should be educating users about video formats and proper ffmpeg usage (e.g. with good cheat sheets), not by hiding complexity that really should not be hidden.

Edit: Reading through my comment again, I have to apologize for the slightly facetious opening statement, even if I quality it later on. The fact that so many ffmpeg wrappers exists is saying something about its apparent difficulty, but as I argue above, a) there are reasons for this (namely, multimedia itself just being complicated), and b) I believe there are good and bad ways to "fix" this, with oversimplified wrappers being more on the "bad" side.

> It's really not that hard,

I've learned not to say this. Different things are easy/hard for each of us.

Reminds me of a discussion where someone argued, "why don't all the poor/homeless people just go get good jobs?"

Edit: I know your comment was meant to inspire/motivate us to try harder. Maybe it's easier than it appears.

Empathy is really not that hard.

I would agree with this statement before LLMs. Reading manuals can take time, be messy, and are sometimes hard to understand.

Now, I can simply ask any LLM to write the command, and understand any following issues or questions.

For example, my OS records videos as WEBM. Using the default settings for transforming to MP4 usually fails from a resolution ratio issue. I would be deadlocked using this library.

It really isn't that hard anymore.

You're getting a lot of flak due to how you started off your comment, but I mostly agree with you.

In my opinion there are two kinds of users: 1. Users who use FFmpeg regularly enough to know/understand the parameters. 2. Users who only use FFmpeg once in a while to do something specific.

This wrapper is superfluous for users in group number 1. But group number 2 does not really get much out of it either, for the reasons you've mentioned.

As a member of group 2, I usually want to do something very specific (e.g. remove an audio track, convert only the video, remux to a different container, etc.). A simple English wrapper does not help me here because it is not powerful enough; the defaults are usually not what I want. What I need is a tool that will take a more detailed English statement of what I want to achieve and spit out the FFmpeg command with explanations for what each parameter does and how it achieves my goal. We have this today: AI; and it mostly works (once you've gone through several iterations of it hallucinating options that do not exist...).

Yes, I use ffmpeg about once a year, in about 350 years I really ought to have all the syntax figure out.

> It's really not that hard,

if you are doing it often that's true. But for people like me who do it once every month or two it really is hard to memorize, especially if it's not exactly the same task.

What I would love would be an interactive script that asked me what I was trying to do and constructed a command line for me while explaining what it would do and the meaning of each argument. And of course it should favour commands that do not re-encode where possible.

I swear I want this as a general tool for all command-line tools.

Start the tool, and just list all of the options in order of usage popularity to toggle on as desired, with a brief explanation, and a field to paste in arguments like filenames or values when needed. If an option is commonly used with another (or requires it), provide those hints (or automatically add the necessary values). If a value itself has structure (e.g. is itself a shell command), drill down recursively. Ensure that quotes and spaces and special characters always get escaped correctly.

In other words, a general-purpose command-line builder. And while we're at it, be able to save particular "templates" for fast re-use, identifying which values should be editable in the future.

I can't be the first person to think of this, but I've never come across anything like it and don't understand why not. It doesn't require AI or anything. Maybe it's the difficulty involved in creating the metadata for each tool, since man pages aren't machine-readable. But maybe that's where AI can help -- not in the tool itself, but to create the initial database of tool options, that can then be maintained by hand?

(Navi [1] does the templating part, but not the "interactive builder" part.)

[1] https://github.com/denisidoro/navi

I’m trying to understand the “In order of usage popularity” thing — this implies telemetry in CLIs, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t the order of options change/fluctuate over time?

Or if no telemetry but based on local usage, it would promote/reinforce the options you already can recall and do use, hiding the ones you can’t/don’t?

And they change quite frequently, from our POV.

That said, I started wrtiting scripts when I use ffmpeg some time ago. At least then I have a non-zero starting point next time.

Indeed why not have —tui option and some basic menu? Even a simplified scripting with reasonable API would be better.

I find myself bothering exactly zero times to memorise this obnoxiously long command line. Claude fills in, and I can explore features better. What’s not to like? That I’m getting dumber for not memorising pages of cli args?

Love the project, but as with every Swiss knife this conversation is a thing and relevant. We had similar one reg JQ syntax and I’m truly convinced JQ is wonderful and useful tool. But I’m not gonna bother learning more DSLs…

>It's really not that hard

It is only a couple of thousand options[0], just memorize them! It super simple, barely an inconvenience!

[0]https://gist.github.com/tayvano/6e2d456a9897f55025e25035478a...

> It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard

It's not hard - just not a good use of our time. For 99% of HN users, ffmpeg is not a vital tool.

I have to use it less than twice a year. Now I just go and get an LLM to tell me the command I need.

And BTW, I spend a lot of time memorizing things (using spaced repetition). So I'm not averse to memorizing. ffmpeg simply doesn't warrant a place in my head.

If you use it from time to time it would be very challenging to remember the million of different options ffmpeg has.

“It's really not that hard”

I’m going to guess your job does not involve much UX design?

I'm not saying it couldn't be better (and I even gave examples), my point is that the drawbacks of such a wrapper outweigh the benefits, at least when it's such an oversimplified one. I've said in other replies how I'd be very interested in e.g. an alternative libav* frontend with better defaults and more consistent argument syntax, but I don't think that this invalidates my criticism of the linked project.

“It’s really not that hard”, well a lot of people have better things to do than remember parameters to commands we barely use.

Totally disagree, I have a wrapper I wrote myself for converting things, often for sharing the odd little clip online or such. It produces a complex command that is not easy to just type out, that does multiple things to maximise compatibility like

- making sure pixel are square while resizing if the video resolution is too large

    ("scale=w=if(gt(iw*sar\\,ih)\\,min(ceil(iw*sar/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(iw*sar*min(ih\\,{})/ih/2)*2):h=if(gt(ih\\,iw*sar)\\,min(ceil(ih/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(ih*min(iw*sar\\,{})/iw/sar/2)\*2):out_range=limited,zscale,setsar=1")

- dealing with some HDR or high gamut thing I can't really remember that can result from screen recording on macos using some method I was using at some point

- setting this one tag on hevc files that macos needs for them to be recognised as hevc but isn't set by default

- calculating the target bitrate if I need a specific filesize and verifying the encode actually hit that size and retrying if not (doesn't always work first time with certain hardware encoders even if they have a target or max bitrate parameter)

- dealing with 2-pass encoding which is fiddly and requires two separate commands and the parameters are codec specific

- correctly activating hardware encoding for various codecs

- etc

And this is just for the basic task of "make this into a simple mp4"

Yes, absolutely. Multimedia is complicated.

But my issue with the linked tool is that it does none of the things you mentioned. All it does it make already very easy things even easier. Is it really that much harder to remember `ffmpeg -i inputfile outputfile.ext` than `ff convert inputfile to ext`?

I've explained this in other replies here but I am neither saying that ffmpeg wrappers are automatically bad, nor that ffmpeg cannot be complicated. I am only saying that this specific tool does not really help much.

Some people just want to use an intuitive tool with better QoL, even if it leads to compromises, to do a job swiftly without going over documentation/learning a ton of new things. Not everything has to be an educational experience. ffmpeg exists in its original form like you prefer, but some folks want to use lossless cut. Nothing wrong with that IMO.

Personally I think it’s great that it’s such a universally useful tool that it has been deployed in so many different variations.

> Some people just want to use a tool to do a job swiftly. Not everything has to be educational.

> some folks want to use lossless cut

In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are:

> "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux

Depending on the size of the video, the time it would take you to "do the job swiftly" (i.e. not caring about how the tools you are using actually work) might be more than just reading the ffmpeg manual, or at the very least searching for some command examples.

> > some folks want to use lossless cut > In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are:

You may have misunderstood the comment: "lossless cut" is the name of an ffmpeg GUI front end. They're not discussing which exact command line gives lossless results.

The thing is that when a video is being re-encoded, so long as I'm not trying to play games on my computer at the same time, I'm free to go do something else. It does not command any of my attention while its working, whereas sitting and reading the man pages commands my attention absolutely.

As the other person said (and this is my mistake for not capitalizing), Lossless Cut is a popular CLI wrapper for ffmpeg with a (somewhat) intuitive interface. Someone is going to be able to pick up and use that a lot faster than they are ffmpeg. I think a lot of folks forget how daunting most people find using a terminal, yet a lot of those people still want something to do a simple lossless trim of an existing video or some other little tweak. It’s good that they have both options (and more).

Looks like a GUI wrapper in fact, no?

Yes thank you I can get a little clumsy with my acronyms. Downside of not being a proper coder/engineer!

No problem. I only asked because if there were a CLI version I wanted to know about it.

> Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0

>It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.

Not really sure how else I was supposed to interpret your comment but clarification taken.

> But I argue in my comment above that this specific tool does not have better QoL

For some folks it may be better/more intuitive. It doesn’t hurt anybody by existing.

We all compromise with different tools in our lives in different ways. It just reads to me like an odd axe to grind.

Simply put: What is so bad about the existence of this project?

> Not really sure how else I was supposed to interpret your comment

Yes, that was a bit facetious of me, I apologize for that.

> What is so bad about the existence of this project?

Being very blunt: The fact that it reinforces the extremely common misconception that a) converting between containers like mkv and mp4 will always require reencoding and that b) there is a single way to reencode a video (hence suggesting that there is no "bad" way to reencode a video), seeing as next to no encoding settings are exposed.

You are overthinking this way too much, to the point that it is sounding like you are purposefully creating out-of-context problems to justify your way too long rant.

As the kids these days say: just take the L, man.

I get what you’re saying but at the end of the day you just need to think about how most people use a tool like this. They’re looking for a simple solution to some specific problem and then they’re likely never using it again. They don’t want to deal with a full-on NLE and iMovie or whatever they have stocked is not cutting it. It’s not worth getting bent out of shape about it ultimately. There are tons of people who use ffmpeg as intended in its original form and more or less understand everything that is going on. The reason we have so many wrappers and variations all centered around ffmpeg is because of how useful it is, so it’s clearly here to stay.

I personally use lossless cut more than ffmpeg in the terminal just because I don’t have to really think about it and it can do most of what I need, which is simply removing or attaching things together without re-encoding. I use it maybe once every month or two, because it’s just not something I need to use a ton, so it doesn’t make sense for me to get down and dirty with the original. Ultimately I get what I need and I’m happy!

sure here's a command that a program I wrote to record my practicing and produce different mixes uses

    /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i "/path/to/musicfile.mp3" -i "/path/to/covertune.mp3" \
       -filter_complex [1:a]volume=1[track1];[0a][track1]amix=normalize=false[output] \
       -map [output] -b:a 192k -metadata title=15:17:01 -metadata "artist=Me, 2025" \
       -metadata album=2025-12-23 "/path/to/file.mix.mp3"

chance of my coming up with that without deep poring over docs and tons of trial and error, or using claude (which is pretty much what I do nowadays): zero

I do, yes. Though that's not really the point, it'd already be enough to know where to look it up.

no the point is that there are some things I've done a hundred times and I never remember it because it's designed in a wildly bad way. ffmpeg, gpg, openssl and git has those things all over the place. Is it -c:v or -v:c? I don't know. used to be -vcodec so it's -v:c now? no it's -c:v I think because they swapped it?

There isn't internal consistency to really hold on to ... it's just a bunch of seemingly independent options.

The biggest problem is open source teams really don't get people on board that focus on customer and product the way commercial software does. This is what we get as a result

> Is it -c:v or -v:c?

Sure, I agree with all of this. Like I said above, the syntax (and, even more, the defaults) isn't great. I'm just arguing that "improving the syntax" should not mean "hiding complexity that should not be hidden", as the linked project does. An alternative ffmpeg frontend (i.e. a new CLI frontend using the libav* libraries like ffmpeg is, not a wrapper for the ffmpeg CLI program) with better syntax and defaults but otherwise similar capabilities would be a very interesting project.

(The answer to your question is that both -vcodec and -c:v are valid, but I imagine that's not the point.)

> The biggest problem is open source teams really don't get people on board that focus on customer and product the way commercial software does.

I believe in this case it may be more of a case of backwards compatibility, with options being added incrementally over time to add what was needed at the moment. Though that's just my guess.

ffmpeg doesn't go away. it's still there. people can use tig and git, having something that isn't insane can live in harmony with the other thing.

When converting video to gif, I always use palettegen, e.g.

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "fps=15,scale=640:-2:flags=lanczos,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=reserve_transparent=off[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=sierra2_4a" -loop 0 output.gif

See also: this blog post from 10 years ago [1]

[1] https://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html

In many cases today “gif” is a misnomer anyway and mp4 is a better choice. Not always, not everywhere supports actual video.

But one case I see often: If you’re making a website with an animated gif that’s actually a .gif file, try it as an mp4 - smaller, smoother, proper colors, can still autoplay fine.

I've been thinking of integrating pngquant as an ffmpeg filter, it would make it possible to generate even better pallettes. That would get ffmpeg on par with gifski.

Does ffmpeg's gif processing support palette-per-frame yet? Last time I compared them (years ago, maybe not long after that blog post), this was a key benefit of gifski allowing it to get better results for the same filesize in many cases (not all, particularly small images, as the total size of the palette information can be significant).

Gifski (https://gif.ski/) might be a good alternative to look to that's gif-pallete aware.

It’s a shame this isn’t the default.

I use `split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen=max_colors=64[p];[s1][p]paletteuse=dither=bayer` personally, limiting the number of colors is a great way to transparently (to a certain point, try with different values) improve compression, as is bayer (ordered) dithering which is almost mandatory to not explode output filesizes.

Those command flags just roll off the tongue like two old friends catching up!

/s

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

LLMs are an amazing advance in natural language parsing.

The problem is someone decided that and the contents of Wikipedia was all something needs to be intelligent haha

The confusion was thinking that language is the same thing as intelligence.

You and me are great examples of that. We are both extremely stupid and yet we can speak.

Can attest.

This seems like a glib one liner but I do think it is profoundly insightful as to how some people approach thinking about LLMs.

It is almost like there is hardwiring in our brains that makes us instinctively correlate language generation with intelligence and people cannot separate the two.

It would be like if for the first calculators ever produced instead of responding with 8 to the input 4 + 4 = printed out "Great question! The answer to your question is 7.98" and that resulted in a slew of people proclaiming the arrival of AGI (or, more seriously, the ELIZA Effect is a thing).

And reddit, that bastion of human achievement.

One that older AI struggled with was the "bounce" effect: play from 0:00 to 0:03, then backwards from 0:03 to 0:00, then repeat 5 times.

Just tried it and got this, is it correct?

> Write an ffmpeg command that implements the "bounce" effect: play from 0:00 to 0:03, then backwards from 0:03 to 0:00, then repeat 5 times.

  ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -filter_complex "
  [0:v]trim=0:3,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[f];
  [f]reverse[r];
  [f][r]concat=n=2:v=1:a=0[b];
  [b]loop=loop=4:size=150:start=0
  " \
  output.mp4

Thanks, but no luck. I tested it on a 3 second video, and got a 6 second video. I.e. it bounced 1 time, not 5 times.

Maybe this should be an AI reasoning test.

Here is what eventually worked, iirc (10 bounces):

  ffmpeg -i input.mkv -filter_complex "split=2[fwd][rev_in]; [rev_in]reverse[rev]; [fwd][rev]concat=n=2,split=10[p1][p2][p3][p4][p5][p6][p7][p8][p9][p10]; [p1][p2][p3][p4][p5][p6][p7][p8][p9][p10]concat=n=10[outv]" -map "[outv]" -an output.mkv

As pessimistic about it as I am, I do think LLMs have a place in helping people turn their text description into formal directives. (Search terms, command-line, SQL, etc.)

... Provided that the user sees what's being made for them and can confirm it and (hopefully) learn the target "language."

Tutor, not a do-for-you assistant.

I agree apart from the learning part. The thing is unless you have some very specific needs where you need to use ffmpeg a lot, there’s just no need to learn this stuff. If I have to touch it once a year I have much better things to spend my time learning than ffmpeg command

Agreed. I have a bunch of little command-line apps that I use 0.3 to 3 times a year* and I'm never going to memorize the commands or syntax for those. I'll be happy to remember the names of these tools, so I can actually find them on my own computer.

* - Just a few days ago I used ImageMagick for the first time in at least three years. I downloaded it just to find that I already had it installed.

There is no universe where I would like to spend brain power on learning ffmpeg commands by heart.

No one learns those. What people do is just learning the UX of the cli and the terminology (codec, opus, bitrate, sampling,…)

Do most devs even look at the source code for packages they install? Or the compiled machine code? I think of this as just a higher level of abstraction. Confirm it works and not worry about the details of how it works

For the kinds of things you’d need to reach for an LLM, there’s no way to trust that it actually generated what you actually asked for. You could ask it to write a bunch of tests, but you still need to read the tests.

It isn’t fair to say “since I don’t read the source of the libraries I install that are written by humans, I don’t need to read the output of an llm; it’s a higher level of abstraction” for two reasons:

1. Most Libraries worth using have already been proven by being used in actual projects. If you can see that a project has lots of bug fixes, you know it’s better than raw code. Most bugs don’t show up unless code gets put through its paces.

2. Actual humans have actual problems that they’re willing to solve to a high degree of fidelity. This is essentially saying that humans have both a massive context window and an even more massive ability to prioritize important things that are implicit. LLMs can’t prioritize like humans because they don’t have experiences.

I don’t because I trust the process to get the artifacts. Why? Because it’s easy to replicate and verify. Just like how proof works in math.

You can’t verify LLM’s output. And thus, any form of trust is faith, not rational logic.

I don't install 3rd party dependencies if I can avoid them. Why? Because although someone could have verified them, there's no guarantee that anybody actually did, and this difference has been exploited by attackers often enough to get its own name, a "supply-chain attack".

With an LLM’s output, it is short enough that I can* put in the effort to make sure it's not obliviously malicious. Then I save the output as an artefact.

* and I do put in this effort, unless I'm deliberately experimenting with vibe coding to see what the SOTA is.

> Because although someone could have verified them, there's no guarantee that anybody actually did

In the case of npm and the like, I don't trust them because they are actually using insecure procedures, which is proven to be so. And the vectors of attacks are well known. But I do trust Debian and the binaries they provide as the risks are for the Debian infrastructure to be compromised, malicious code in in the original source, and cryptographic failures. All threes are possibles, but there's more risk of bodily harm to myself that them happening.

It you stretch it little further, those formal directives also include language and vocabulary of a particular domain (legalese, etc…).

The "provided" isn't provided, of course, especially the learning part, that's not what you'd turn to AI for vs more reliable tutoring alternatives

But doesnt something like this interface kind of show the inefficiency of this? Like we can all agree ffmpeg is somewhat esoteric and LLMs are probably really great at it, but at the end of the day if you can get 90% of what you need with just some good porcelain, why waste the energy spinning up the GPU?

Requiring the installation of a massive kraken like node.js and npm to run a commandline executable hardly screams efficiency...

That's a deficiency with this particular implementation, not an inherent disadvantage to the method

Because FFmpeg is a swiss army knife with a million blades and I don't think any easy interface is really going to do the job well. It's a great LLM use case.

But you only need to find the correct tool once and mark it in some way. Aka write a wrapper script, jot down some notes. You are acting like you’re forced to use the cli each time.

One can do that with LLM as well. Honestly, I almost always just save the command if I think I am going to use it later. Also, I can just look back at the chat history.

I know everybody uses a subscription for these things, but doesn't it at least feel expensive to use an LLM like this? Like turning on the oven to heat up a single slice of pizza.

No, LLMs are extremely useful for dealing with ffmpeg. Also I don't think they're sufficient, they get confused too easily and ffmpeg is extremely confusing.

Because the porcelain is purpose built for a specific use case. If you need something outside of what its author intended, you'll need to get your hands dirty.

And, realistically, compute and power is cheap for getting help with one-off CLI commands.

I like it and would like to see an entire Linux OS being done in a similar manner. Or shell / wrapper / whatever.

A sane homogeneous cli for once, that treats its user as a human instead of forcing them to remember the incompatible invocation options of `tar` and `dd` for absolutely no reason.

    zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9
    write my-iso ./zip.zip onto external hard drive
    git delete commit 1a4db4c
    convert ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 into ./out.mp4
    merge ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 to ./out.mp4 without re-encoding

And add amazing autocomplete, while allowing as many wordings as possible. No need for LLMs.

One can dream.

> write my-iso ./zip.zip onto external hard drive

Dang! not that one, the other one!

> zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9

What do you mean, I don't have write permissions in the current working directory? I meant for you to put the output in $HOME, i mean /tmp, i mean /var/tmp, i mean on the external hard drive, no other other one.

> git delete commit 1a4db4c

What did you do? I didn't mean delete it and erase it from the reflog and run gc! I just mean "delete it" the way any one would ever mean that! I can never get it back now!

Why not use Windows or macOS then? You don't need to use shells there.

I would prefer not to change the technical aspects of Linux. I actually cherish it.

See my more generalized CLI helper which does exactly this:

https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme

Example usage:

    helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps
    helpme zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9
    helpme git delete commit 1a4db4c
    ...

This originated from an ffmpeg wrapper I wrote but then realized it could be used for all commands:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410637

The total upheaval of the current computing paradigm that AI will bring, if nothing else, is

"Hey computer, can you convert that funny kitchen cooking scene in this movie to a .gif I can share online?"

You're wasting your time on a dead man walking paradigm doing anything else. "Plain English" actually means plain English now.

You're not wrong, but also there is value in a tool that will behave the same way consistently and has been vetted. I wouldn't be so down on this work.

It's not so much being down on the work, as it is being down on 30 years of keyboard junkies proclaiming "Plain English" interfaces.

It is a bit of a catch-22, a plain english wrapper opens up the tool to be more widely used by novices, but also prevents those novices from actually learning the tool.

Not really, how are they prevented from using the manual or the copious amounts of examples out there?

Memorising command line options beyond the absolute basics has rarely been helpful to me. And I use FreeBSD, where arcane commands are plentiful.

Nothing, but after becoming reliant on an LLM they may simply become overwhelmed and give up once they outgrow it's capabilities. I've seen this happen to several people I know.

Can't access the githup repo https://github.com/josharsh/ezff

Same here, I get a 404 from github. The said link is at the bottom of the submitted npmjs page.

yeah me too but npm has the code tab https://www.npmjs.com/package/ezff?activeTab=code

No AI is appealing but there is the cliff problem. If there is one small thing the mini language can't handle, the user would have no chance solving it themselves. They might as well start with an LLM solution first.

One workaround is that when there is syntax error, let user optionally switch to LLM?

I would definitely use an LLM, to see what the suggested options do and tweak them.

Using a different package name could be helpful. I searched for ezff docs and found a completely different Python library. Also ez-ffmpeg turns up a Rust lib which looks great if calling from Rust.

LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. Sometimes it takes 2-3 attempts/fixes ("The subtitles in the video your command generated are offset: i see the subtitles from the beginning of the movie but the video is cut from the middle of the movie as requested, fix the command") but it generally creates complex commands much more quickly than manual work (reading the man page, crafting the command, debugging it) would.

npm? Have we learned nothing from the weekly node/npm security breaches? Not putting that hot mess anywhere near my dev box, thanks.

That's the problem ideally solved by typed data, i.e., some UI where instead of trying to memorize whether it's thumb/s/nails you can read the closed list of alternatives, read contextual help and pick one

This is why we have fish tab completions. Does exactly that; list of possible commands with contextual help. Fish rules.

Yeah, no, that's a pale imitation that only addresses the one specific example given. But, like, how would you even know what target formats are supported? Break the flow and look it up or simply read the drop-down list? The free type-any-text interface with poor helpers is the worst in accessibility

Which format is the default if no argument is given?

Or more complicated contextual knowledge - if you cut 1sec of a video file, does fish autocomplete to tell you whether the video is reencoded or cut (otherwise) losslessly

Also, what does fish complete to on Windows?

Which flow is being broken here? Especially when the information is easily accessible with `man`.

the flow that doesn't require you to open a different tab or cancel a command to `man` your way through dozens of poorly searchable pages of documentation, but allows you to continue translating what you want in your mind into the interface command with delay potentially subsecond interrupts

Is there kind of rewards for speed running typing ffmpeg flags? Like an advent of ffmpeg?

I know what I want to do, I don't know how it's being done, but there's a wealth of information that is very accessible. So I just read it.

It's very easy to type `apropos ffmpeg`. And even if you typed `man ffmpeg`, if you go to the end, you will find related manuals name for more information. And you can always use the pager (`less` in most case) facility for quick search.

I believe that a lot of frustration comes from people unwilling to learn the conceptual basis of the tools they are using.

What's the reward for trivializing real issues and coming up with broken "solutions"?

> It's very easy to type `apropos ffmpeg`

No it's not. First, that's not a Windows command, so right off the bat you've cut off the largest OS. Second, your command is naively empty and it's telling that you've given it instead of an actual search query because you wouldn't be able to come up with a great one right away that would result in the correct result at the top - while the correct resuls is "hardcoded" in the field type in the UI. So yeah, go on, find that perfect query and then explain why you think every single user should be able to do the same quickly. Then you can think about how justified your other beliefs are about basic workflow issues you don't understand

> What's the reward for trivializing real issues and coming up with broken "solutions"

Then any solutions is broken in this way. Even my bluetooth speaker comes with a manual. Not reading it and saying the speaker is broken, because you can't figure how to connect is pure delusion. Same as not reading ffmpeg manual and expecting to know how to use it.

> First, that's not a Windows command, so right off the bat you've cut off the largest OS.

ffmpeg on Window is so far the beaten path that it may as well be in Mordor. I would gladly bet that someone that knows how to run ffmpeg on windows also knows how to find the documentation for it.

> So yeah, go on, find that perfect query

Why would I find the perfect query? Do you go in the library and then find the correct line of the correct book in one go? Or do you consult the list of books of books for a theme, select a few candidates, consult their index, and then read the pages?

Then all of that is left to do is to note down the reference if you need to consult the book again (no need to remember everything).

> Then any solutions is broken in this way.

Nope, you're just doing the same thing - purposefully ignoring the issue to make your non-solution comparable...

> Even my bluetooth speaker comes with a manual.

... in this case - the length and scope of the manual. First, you can operate the speaker without the manual or with just a single read of the manual- so spend a few seconds to learn how to pair (but you might not even need that as "hold to pair" might be something you remember from other devices), then the power/volume buttons require no manual because you've operated such buttons your whole life.

> Same as not reading ffmpeg manual

Of course it's not the same, the ffmpeg manual isn't a tiny page of 5 items, and no other apps will help you learn the peculiarities of ffmpeg. Also, the whole point of intuitive UI with "typed info" is that you don't need to read that huge manual to do the basics as you can simply follow the structure laid out by someone more knowledgeable

> ffmpeg on Window is so far the beaten path that it may as well be in Mordor. I would gladly bet that someone that knows how to run ffmpeg on windows also knows how to find the documentation for it.

Who would take that irrelevant bet? The issue isn't in finding! the manual!

> Why would I find the perfect query?

To prove that your solution works. I know it doesn't and challenge you to prove otherwise. Your suggestion is worse than asking users to Google, because at least there users will likely get the correct top result in a few tries for common needs

> Do you go in the library and then find the correct line of the correct book in one go?

No, I open an app and pick the correct format from the drop-down menu correctly in one go

> Or do you consult the list of books of books for a theme, select a few candidates, consult their index, and then read the pages?

Oh man, even in your fantasies you can't come up with a good workflow! No wonder you're fine suggesting everyone wastes a lot of time aproposing empty queries

If you take the set of possible ffmpeg invocations, it's very huge. Yes, it's possible to create some kind of wrapper that serve some common cases. And there are many of such wrappers or alternative tools like Xld (macOS) or Handbrake. But when you do need to use ffmpeg, that means that such wrapper is unfit for some reason or another. And in that case, it's not that much of an effort to read the manual which is very comprehensive.

It's the same with video viewers or music players. Often the default app of the OS is enough and they are very intuitive. But sometimes you need a bit more control and that's when using something like vlc or mpv which their extensive filter capabilities (which requires to have the doc at hand) is mandatory.

ffmpeg interface is ok for what it does. Any of your suggestion would be complex to implement if it aims to support the whole feature set of ffmpeg.

"why would one solve the problem with one drop-down menu if you can solve it with 20 minutes of browsing walls of text"

lol

> it handles 20 common patterns ... that cover 90%

Could you elaborate on this? I see a lot of AI-use and I'm wondering if this is claude speaking or you

Somehow it seems ffmpeg has become the "Can it run crysis" of UX design

Inspiring! I just asked Cursor to make llmwrap inspired by this, it's like rlwrap (readline wrap) but with LLMs!

https://github.com/sirodoht/llmwrap

I actually just use Claude code. “Stabilize the video x.mp4 and keep my daughter Astra as the subject. Convert it to a GIF that is under a megabyte”. It does a great job.

It will sample images from the video then go crop the video to that, stabilize if required, and then make me an optimized GIF that I can put in my weekly journal.

I can only speak to my experience, but I spent a long time being puzzled by video editor user interfaces, until I ran into ScreenFlow about ten years ago. For whatever reason, the UI clicked, and I've used it ever since. It's a single purchase, not monthly, and relatively affordable. https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm

I like the idea, but a CLI utility dependent on Node.js is not a good thing frankly.

I agree. Apart from having to use npm (and its package repository being susceptible to security issues), I’d prefer something a lot simpler. Could’ve been a Rust program or a Go program (a single executable) that could be built locally or installed (using several different methods and offering a choice).

Very cool idea since ffmpeg is one of those tools that has a few common tasks but most users would need to look up the syntax every time to implement them (or make an alias). In line with the ease of use motivation, you might consider supporting tab completion.

GitHub repo link returns 404.

I have a little script that I use on the CLI to do this kind of stuff (calls an LLM to figure out how to do CLI stuff) but you can just as easily now use any of the coding agents.

That's beautiful! I see a .claude folder in your code, I am curious if you've "vibecoded" the whole project or just had claude there for some tasks! not that it matters or takes away from your work but just pure curiosity as someone who enjoys betting on the LLM output XD

This looks handy.. along with the odd gist of "convert mkv to mp4" that I have to use every other week.

Quite telling that these tools need to exist to make ffmpeg actually usable by humans (including very experienced developers).

i figure out the niche ffmpeg commands various chain filters, etc then expose them from my python cli tool with words similar to what this gentleman above has done.

If one has fewer such commands its as simple as just bash aliases and just adding it to ~/.bashrc

alias convertmkvtomp4='ffmpeg command'

then just run it anytime with just that alias phrase i use ffmpeg a lot so i have my own dedicated cli snippet tool for me, to quickly build out complex pipeline in easier language

the best part is i have --dry-run then exposes the flow + explicit commands being used at each step, if i need details on whats happening and verbose output at each step

I have a text file with some common commands, so no tools needed.

But yea ffmpeg is awesome software, one of the great oss projects imo. working with video is hellish and it makes it possible.

I was surprised that macOS (QuickTime/Preview, iMovie) can't read .mp4 files. Not sure if it was due to H.265 or the audio codec. I tried using ffmpeg to convert to .mov but that also failed to open, since I guess MOV is just another container format.

Is there an easier way?

MP4 is container, not format, so if you have unsupported format packed into MP4 container it won’t be played. Example is trying to play AV1 video codec on devices with M2 chip or older. It won’t play. But it will play on devices with M3 chip and newer. Easiest solution is to use other player so that you can watch any MP4 file but with software decoding where hardware decoding is not available. Examples of such players are MPV or VLC.

Yes, VLC works fine for playing. The user wanted to edit some mp4 videos with iMovie (vs ffmpeg).

I think it was an M4 Mac. Does iMovie need a codec pack? I know some PC OEMs don't ship an h.265 codec, pointing users to a $0.99 download. Thought Mac would include it, being aimed at content creators. Hoping for a cheaper solution than Adobe Premiere.

IMHO the de-facto video player for macOS is [IINA](https://iina.io/).

That exists, but it’s still VLC.

It's based on mpv, not vlc.

Try something like: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v h264 -c:a aac out.mp4

To re-encode the content into H.264+AAC, rather than simply "muxing" the encoded bitstreams from the MP4 container into a new MOV container.

Thanks, I can even somewhat remember that. AI gave me args like

  -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset medium -crf 18 \
  -c:a aac -b:a 192k \

"-c:v h264_videotoolbox -b:v 5000k" on macos, it will use hardware encoder.

vlc

I would love to see something like this for OpenSSL

interesting approach, i solved similar problem by creating visual tool to generate ffmpeg commands but its not the same(it cant do conversion etc.)

I like that you took no AI approach, i am looking for something like this i.e. understanding intent and generating command without using AI but so far regex based approaches have proved to be inadequate. I also tried indexing keywords and creating index of keywords with similar meaning that improved the situation a bit but without something heavy like bert its always a subpar experience.

There is no need for a wrapper or memorizing syntax in our new llm world.

Thanks, will definitely check this out

Has anyone else been avoiding typing FFmpeg commands by using file:// URLs with yt-dlp

Sometimes an idea comes along thats so obvious it makes me angry. I have been struggling with ffmpeg commands for over well a decade. All the time I wasted googling and creating scripts so I wouldn't have to regoogle and this could have existed literally from day one

Uhm... Millibit, Millibyte, Megabit, Megabyte?

Good point, "mb" as used in the linked example would mean "millibit", which is almost certainly not what they meant.

See also:

https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme

    helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps

This evolved from an ffmpeg wrapper I wrote before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410637