Let's be honest, it kinda sucks. The commands are barely explained it feels more left as an exercise for the reader to do the puzzle solving of whats trying to be communicated.
Honestly if these processing chain diagrams just had a rollover where if you roll over parts of the command or the block in the chain and the other part highlighted with a description of what the switch was actually doing then a lot more people would be able to understand this, especially if real world before and after examples of outputs were included.
Instead it's <diagram of the chain> <raw string of the command> "Note: one caveat about something"
I am sure there exist people who live and breath media/codecs and they're reasonably fluent at getting ffmpeg to do what they want because of a tremendous amount of practice.
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
I sympathise with the overwhelming sensation of the ffmpeg command line arguments.
But the more you familiarize yourself with a/v streaming and transcoding, you soon realize why you need such amount of control.
I mean, with ffmpeg I can easily combine 3 audio clips, 5 subtitles and a separate video, cut away first 25 seconds and the last 5 minutes of the resulting clip, resize it and change the aspect ratio, reduce audio to mono and specify output codecs for audio and video.
And this is still a pretty simple example of what one could want to do.
Ffmpeg has countless other amazing features, demanding more arguments.
How about for example camera stabilization? (-vf deshake)
How would one even start to explain all of this to an app without thousands of command line arguments?
The whole subject is incredibly complex and ffmpeg is by far the most amazing project in this space.
Without ffmpeg, there would be no youtube in 2005, no plex at all and really the whole of modern social web would probably have happened later if not Fabrice was such a fantastic guy :-)
whywhywhywhy|7 months ago
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html
Let's be honest, it kinda sucks. The commands are barely explained it feels more left as an exercise for the reader to do the puzzle solving of whats trying to be communicated.
Honestly if these processing chain diagrams just had a rollover where if you roll over parts of the command or the block in the chain and the other part highlighted with a description of what the switch was actually doing then a lot more people would be able to understand this, especially if real world before and after examples of outputs were included.
Instead it's <diagram of the chain> <raw string of the command> "Note: one caveat about something"
crispyambulance|7 months ago
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
0points|7 months ago
But the more you familiarize yourself with a/v streaming and transcoding, you soon realize why you need such amount of control.
I mean, with ffmpeg I can easily combine 3 audio clips, 5 subtitles and a separate video, cut away first 25 seconds and the last 5 minutes of the resulting clip, resize it and change the aspect ratio, reduce audio to mono and specify output codecs for audio and video.
And this is still a pretty simple example of what one could want to do.
Ffmpeg has countless other amazing features, demanding more arguments.
How about for example camera stabilization? (-vf deshake)
How would one even start to explain all of this to an app without thousands of command line arguments?
The whole subject is incredibly complex and ffmpeg is by far the most amazing project in this space.
Without ffmpeg, there would be no youtube in 2005, no plex at all and really the whole of modern social web would probably have happened later if not Fabrice was such a fantastic guy :-)
imtringued|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]