[agys]

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

[Barrin92]

it can work but it's far from science fiction. LLMs tend to produce extremely subpar if not buggy ffmpeg code. They'll routinely do things like put the file parameter before the start time which needlessly decodes the entire video, produce wrong bitrates, re-encode audio needlessly, and so on.

If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.

[pmarreck]

what... wait... In what universe do people write argument processing that doesn't process the content of all the arguments upfront AND THEN do things in the right order??

[amenhotep]

ffmpeg -i in -ss start -to end out is wrong and bad? You can -ss before -i? TIL!

[xandrius]

Had to do exactly that with a bunch of screenshots I took but happened to include a bunch of unnecessary parts of the screen.

A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.

The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.

[euroderf]

Are you accusing Blade Runner of infringing FFmpeg IP ?