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I still find it kinda odd that this is still the best tool out there for this sort of work. Archaic parameters and options and exceptionally hard to read docume
by Quarrelsome 7y ago
I still find it kinda odd that this is still the best tool out there for this sort of work. Archaic parameters and options and exceptionally hard to read documentation.
Maybe I'm just dumb and not in the domain enough to get a decent handle but everytime I use ffmpeg I feel like a Norse Shaman trying through trial and error to locate the correct orientation of runes for the blessing.
- hazeii 7y agoNot sure how true it is, but I read somewhere that the reason it's so good at what it does is because it's used at scale by certain large websites (youtube being specifically mentioned).
- Quarrelsome 7y agoI don't know of any other tool that does what it does. I used it myself when handling video and needing to re-encode or fix up output captured from elsewhere. Its a swiss-army knife of video operations.
- Daemon404 7y agoYou've got cause and effect backwards there (mostly; it goes both ways). Disclosure: FFmpeg contributor and Vimeo employee.
- Hello71 7y agothere are two problems here. the main problem is that nobody reads the manual, which actually starts out half-decent. the description is very clear, concise, and even contains the oft-whinged-about examples. https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html the second problem is that ffmpeg has a lot of features, and nobody wants to go through and fully document hundreds of formats, codecs, and filters.
- Daemon404 7y agoPart of the problem is that the documentation is so vast (the page you link is only one of many, many pages; the documentation has been split out into multiple pages for a while now) that as a user, it's fairly insane to try and consume and comprehend it all, especially if all you want to do is something quick.
- _Gyan_ 7y agoI'll be adding entries for all the missing demuxers/decoders/encoders/muxers eventually. At present, only a fraction have been documented.
- zbobet2012 7y agoThe third problem is that video is _complicated_. What does the nal-hrd=cbr do? Well you need to understand the HRD model and (which is about 5 pages of dense specs). Ffmpeg does a great job of guessing _what_ you want. But as soon as you're outside of those guesses you need to know _a lot_ to get things working.
- GuB-42 7y agoI wonder how Avisynth is doing now. In the early 2000s it was my tool of choice for video conversions. It used scripts, and it required external tools to do the encoding but despite the complexity, I found it less arcane than ffmpeg command lines for similar operations.
- busterarm 7y agoI've used both. AviSynth 2.6 is really long in the tooth (honestly it's kind of a disaster) and 3.0 never happened. AviSynth+ seems interesting, but I don't know anyone using it outside of piracy communities. Once I got better at understanding FFmpeg's filters there really was no looking back.
- sorenjan 7y agoHandbrake is a popular GUI on top of ffmpeg.