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.
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
> Half of scripting FFmpeg is just fighting with shell quote escaping for filter_complex.
-filter_complex_script is a thing
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?
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…
I cut a whole documentary in ffmpeg
I just tell Claude Code what I want to do and that it has imagemagick and ffmpeg available and it does all the work for me. Because it's got an agentic flow, it loops around, checks the output and fixes things up.
I can ask it to orient people the right way, crop to the important parts, etc. and it will figure out what "the right way", "the important parts", etc. are. Sometimes I have to give it some light hints like "extract n frames from before y to figure out things", but most of the time it just does it.
Claude Code acts like a very general purpose agent for me. About the one thing that I have to manually do that I'm annoyed by is editing 360 videos into a flow. I'd like to be able to tell Claude Code to "follow my daughter as I dunk her in the pool" and stuff like that but I have to do that myself in the GoPro editor.
I use LLMs to help navigate FFmpeg. It hasn’t failed me yet.
This is yc propping up a startup they have backed, there isn't much substance here.
AI is game changer for the wildly detailed ffmpeg command line-- just tell gpt what you want to do and it will spit out the ffmpeg command 10/10.
ffmpeg is awful, except for all the other tools that are awfuller and does not even work
I considered FFmpeg a great project, but I usually avoid to use it directly because of his quite complex syntax. I'm reconsidering it because coupled with an llm is very straightforward and more immediate than an usual graphical editor
ffmpeg is the only community where I've asked for help and been told "if you have to ask, you're too stupid to use this project". Needless to say, it was a welcoming community I continued engaging with.
I use ChatGPT for this kind of complexity.
It works 99% of the time for my use case.
HTML <video> or <audio> element with "Streaming" URLs passed to the media player (or internally in the web browser for the big ones).
Read the entire landing page. Still do not understand 100x bot is ?
FFmpeg continues to be the great filter of those that don't RTFM.
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…