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  • Hacker News
  • I don’t entirely understand who this is for.

    - For one-offs, you would just use a GUI.

    - For regular edits where you want creative control, you would use a NLE GUI.

    - For regular edits where you want consistency, you would have a limited GUI without access to ffmpeg options.

    CLI/prompt-based editing for a visual medium is how a programmer might approach editing but no creative…

    by harrall
  • This is yc propping up a startup they have backed, there isn't much substance here.
    by 4gotunameagain
  • This doesn't make any sense; the Before and After examples accomplish different things. I also don't get who the target audience is; people intimidated by a CLI tool but at home with technical agents?
    by skeeter2020
  • > Half of scripting FFmpeg is just fighting with shell quote escaping for filter_complex.

    -filter_complex_script is a thing

    by IsTom
  • As someone who has used ffmpeg for 10+ years maintaining a relatively complex backend service that's basically a JSON to ffmpeg translator I did not fully understand this article.

    Like the Before vs after section doesn't even seem to create the same thing, the before has no speedup, the after does.

    In the end it seems they basically created a few services ("recipes") that they can reuse to do simple stuff like speed-up 2x or combine audio / video or whatever

    by jack_pp
  • Have to admit, ffmpeg syntax is not trivial... but also the project is 24 years old and is basically the defacto industry standard. If you believe you will still be editing videos in 20 years with the CLI (or any other tool or any programming language) wrapping it then it's probably worth few hours learning how it actually works.
    by utopiah
  • An aside but related?

    FFmpeg has complex syntax because it’s dealing with the _complexity of video_. I agree with everyone about knowing (and helping create or contribute to) our tools.

    Today I largely forget about the _legacy_ of video, the technical challenges, and how critical it was to get it right.

    There are an incredible number of output formats and considerations for _current_ screens (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, etc…). Then we have a whole other world on the creation side for capture, edit, live broadcast…

    On legacy formats it used to be so complex with standards, requirements, and evolving formats. Today, we don’t even think about why we have 29.97fps around? Interlacing?

    We have a mix of so many incredible (and sometimes frustrating) codecs, needs and final outputs, so it’s really amazing the power we have with a tool like FFmpeg… It’s daunting but really well thought out.

    So just a big thanks to the FFmpeg team for all their incredible work over the years…

    by sanjit

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