Posted by josharsh 5 hours ago
Instead of: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos" -loop 0 output.gif
You write: ff convert video.mp4 to gif
More examples: ff compress video.mp4 to 10mb ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00 ff extract audio from video.mp4 ff resize video.mp4 to 720p ff speed up video.mp4 by 2x ff reverse video.mp4
There are similar tools that use LLMs (wtffmpeg, llmpeg, ai-ffmpeg-cli), but they require API keys, cost money, and have latency.
Ez FFmpeg is different: - No AI – just regex pattern matching - Instant – no API calls - Free – no tokens - Offline – works without internet
It handles ~20 common operations that cover 90% of what developers actually do with ffmpeg. For edge cases, you still need ffmpeg directly.
Interactive mode (just type ff) shows media files in your current folder with typeahead search.
npm install -g ezff
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.
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 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.
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
[1] https://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html
/s
The problem is someone decided that and the contents of Wikipedia was all something needs to be intelligent haha
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).
> 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... 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.
* - 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.
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.
You can’t verify LLM’s output. And thus, any form of trust is faith, not rational logic.
And, realistically, compute and power is cheap for getting help with one-off CLI commands.
Quite telling that these tools need to exist to make ffmpeg actually usable by humans (including very experienced developers).
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
But yea ffmpeg is awesome software, one of the great oss projects imo. working with video is hellish and it makes it possible.
Could you elaborate on this? I see a lot of AI-use and I'm wondering if this is claude speaking or you
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?
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.