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Ffmpeg is an unusual piece of software. It’s CLI arguments (to me) are baffling. But it’s been around so long that there’s so many answered questions online for
by ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Ffmpeg is an unusual piece of software. It’s CLI arguments (to me) are baffling. But it’s been around so long that there’s so many answered questions online for virtually anything you want it to do. Don’t bother reading the man page, go to google first.
- donatj 6y agoI felt the same for years, but when you really dig into it you can learn a handful of flags that will get you what you want 90% of the time, and you can Go to Google after that set fails you.
- the_only_law 6y agoRidiculously useful piece of software, but yeah the docs baffle me more than help me.
- kyriakos 6y agoIts cli became so complex to account for all its use cases which could have been replaced by a config file at this point.
- asveikau 6y agoA config file makes sense if every run takes the same config. But most ffmpeg options are specific to a task and inapplicable to many others.
- m-p-3 6y agoYeah I just make bunch of bash files (which also contains comment) for specific scenarios.
- Griffinsauce 6y agoWhat's the difference with selecting different config files then?
- naniwaduni 6y agoYou don't need a config file for simple cases. There's no firm boundary between simple cases and cases where you'd want to use a config file; it's partly a quantity thing, partly familiarity. It could probably be nicer with a way to specify a file to read options from, but it's not as if there aren't plenty of ways to represent an argv as a text file already, so it doesn't seem like a high priority.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asveikau 6y agoI feel like the basics are simple and intuitive. Enough use of it and you will not consult docs for the most basic tasks. Then you start to think "but how do I...?" and go to google. I tend to also forget the answer after a few months.
- bigbubba 6y ago> I tend to also forget the answer after a few months You can add comments to the end of tricky commands with the # character. Then at a later date you can search for commands using the contents of those comments, using something like C-r.
- asveikau 6y agoOn some machines I don't have ~/.history. On others, there is a size limit so when I grep the history file after a few months it might not be there. Personally, rather than interactively putting comments in my shell input, I prefer to write scripts or take notes in a text file.
- riidom 6y agoThere are also tools with a GUI that make use of ffmpeg (calling them a GUI-wrapper is probably not fair). And ofc, they likely can't do everything ffmpeg CLI can. One I know is https://handbrake.fr https://handbrake.fr Are there more?
- ars 6y ago> Are there more? http://www.avidemux.org/ http://www.avidemux.org/
- verylittlemeat 6y agoI use Axiom to do basic ffmpeg stuff on a regular basis and it's never let me down. https://axiomui.github.io/ https://axiomui.github.io/
- mbeex 6y agoCloser to the underlying originals CLI: https://www.videohelp.com/software/FFmpeg-Batch https://www.videohelp.com/software/FFmpeg-Batch
- alfg 6y agoSomething I've been working on lately. Not really a GUI wrapper, but more a command generator for some of the common operations. https://alfg.github.io/ffmpeg-commander/ https://alfg.github.io/ffmpeg-commander/
- m-p-3 6y agoThat, and I usually comment my ffmpeg commands to understand what I wanted it to do when I get back to it later.
- the_cat_kittles 6y agoits a very good example of what is truly useful conflicting with widely held notions of whats important to make good software. basically, despite the arcane invocations, i find it gets the job done more painlessly than any alternative most of the time.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThere are wrappers over it, the Python one[1] is pretty good and it lets you build complex pipelines represented with graphs. [1] https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python