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Posted by josharsh 7 hours ago

Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English(npmjs.com)
I built a CLI tool that lets you do common video/audio operations without remembering ffmpeg syntax.

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

181 points | 66 commentspage 2
vivzkestrel 2 hours ago|
I would love to see something like this for OpenSSL
mmahemoff 7 hours ago||
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.
spullara 5 hours ago||
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.
Kwpolska 6 hours ago||
GitHub repo link returns 404.
broken-kebab 5 hours ago||
I like the idea, but a CLI utility dependent on Node.js is not a good thing frankly.
AnonC 1 hour ago||
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).
tclancy 4 hours ago||
That ship sailed some time ago.
gamer191 4 hours ago||
Thanks, will definitely check this out

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

pdyc 5 hours ago||
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.

Kcnfjhggjbh 2 hours ago||
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bdbdbdb 6 hours ago||
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
Tempest1981 7 hours ago|
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?

kiicia 5 hours ago||
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.
Tempest1981 1 hour ago||
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.

felixfoertsch 6 hours ago|||
IMHO the de-facto video player for macOS is [IINA](https://iina.io/).
trvz 5 hours ago||
That exists, but it’s still VLC.
wging 5 hours ago||
It's based on mpv, not vlc.
andrewf 3 hours ago|||
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.

Tempest1981 24 minutes ago||
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 \
codegladiator 6 hours ago||
vlc
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