4 ms·
FFmpeg is wonderful software. Growing up as a Windows user in the early 2000s, devices were far more picky than they are today about which video codecs they'd s
by joenot443 3y ago
FFmpeg is wonderful software. Growing up as a Windows user in the early 2000s, devices were far more picky than they are today about which video codecs they'd support. It was a non-trivial task as an 11yo trying to convert DivX .avis into an MP4 my old iPod Video could understand. Discovering ffmpeg and finding that someone was offering for free what I otherwise could only find under mountains of crappy shareware was a real watershed moment.
20 years later it's still a goto. Great tool.
- ant6n 3y agoI remember Back in 2007, during a far away vacation, using ffmpeg on a windows netbook to convert star trek episodes into a format my little mp3 player could understand and play on its little screen (320x240?). It was amazing that even on the 600-900 MHz cpu, those videos transcoded in a matter of minutes.
- sergiotapia 3y agoI've always said ffmpeg is one of the new wonders of the world. It powers so much, is so complex, so irreplaceable. It's crazy we get to enjoy it for free. I use it to encode my movies and tv shows to AV1/720p. & $ffmpegPath -i $_.FullName -r 23.976 -vf scale=1280:720 -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -crf 30 -preset 10 -g 300 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -ac 2 -c:s copy -map 0 $destPath
- SoothingSorbet 3y agoIt's also a testament to the power of open source software. ffmpeg is in a significant amount of software touching audio/video in some way, and we are all enriched because everyone is free to use it.
- RGamma 3y agoObvious xkcd 2347 mention
- bharathyes 3y agowhy AV1 in 720p ? is it just for watcking in smaller devices or for archiving too? isnt AV1 encoders still very slow compared to h265 ?
- chalupa-man 3y agoThe preferred AV1 encoder that ships with ffmpeg, SVT-AV1, is faster than any software H.265 encoder now. You can encode 1080p video in real time at preset 6 (the equivalent of 'medium' -- presets are on a scale from 0 to 13) on a $120 desktop CPU.
- brnt 3y agoWhy AV1? I convert much to 720p PS3 compliant H264, for maximum device compatibility. I take an external drive with these files with me when I travel, and in 99% of the cases plugging it into hotel TVs just works.
- sergiotapia 3y agoI only play these files on my second monitor as background noise when I'm coding boring stuff. Day of The Dead is 696MB, and looks great on my monitor. https://files.catbox.moe/cm88w0.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/cm88w0.jpg I don't need more for this use case. 577 movies so far, at 466GB! God bless the AV1 team!
- brnt 3y agoHe he, I have a secret aversion to movies exceeding 1GB :) I know what you mean! I wonder what video fidelity I would gain moving to something more modern. It's just really convenient being able to playback anywhere.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> I wonder what video fidelity I would gain moving to something more modern. At the very least, 1080p instead of 720p.
- Nihilartikel 3y agoI've found av1 and h265 handle some things better than h264 at almost any bitrate. Usually around film grain compression.
- briffle 3y agoOh god, DivX.. I had almost forgotten. Lets write a new video compression algorithm that is super efficient - great this lets us compress movies so they can fit on cheap CD's, instead of DVDs. - great We can now give those CD's away with movies on them - great And then every time someone puts one in a DivX player they can pay us to watch/rent it, instead of having to drive to blockbuster - wait, what? Its easy, we'll just use a phone line that everyone has right near their entertainment center in their living room to phone home at night and send the data of what movies you watched and how many times. - what are they smoking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
- nly 3y agoI think you're confusing DivX the codec and DIVX the disc media platform. Afaict these aren't related. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX
- _aavaa_ 3y agoHow in the world were they both able to use that name?
- pavlov 3y agoDIVX the physical disc distribution company was a famous flop. DivX the video codec started out as an unlicensed hacked version of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 v3 codec binary. Since it wasn’t a commercial product and was legally dubious, the author called it DivX ;-) with the smiley in the name. When it became unexpectedly popular during the dot-com boom time, someone of course set up a DivX company that dropped the smiley, eventually rewrote the codec, and presumably acquired the trademark from the defunct DIVX (or just took it over if the registration expired, I don’t know).
- chasd00 3y ago> and presumably acquired the trademark from the defunct DIVX (or just took it over if the registration expired, I don’t know). and then, iirc, this is where xvid come into being. I think it was the same codec just re-written and given back to the opensource world, hence the reason for naming it "divx" spelled backwards.
- ryandrake 3y agoI remember the default media player that shipped on Windows was absolutely terrible because it could only play a very limited number of file formats, none of which were actually used much by movie files found in the wild. If you wanted to actually play a video, you had to try your luck and choose among several 3p "codec packs" half of which were probably loaded with malware. People who have always lived in a world with great software like VLC and MPV and ffmpeg underestimate how hard it was to actually play a video file on your computer back in 2000.
- blahyawnblah 3y agoCodecs packs... Ugh.
- brobinson 3y agoK-Lite Mega Codec Pack!
- therein 3y agoI remember always installing that. Also GOM Player was also a thing.
- ashconnor 3y agoThat and Media Player Classic
- garaetjjte 3y agoOr ffdshow
- m-p-3 3y agoWe had an old software at work that would only take a specific file format, and of course the files came from multiple sources, which made it really painful for the users. We transformed a relatively decent desktop into a ffmpeg transcoding machine, which would monitor files incoming from a samba share and it would output the converted file into another samba share. It was just a bunch of scripts and cron jobs but it worked much better than I anticipated and it was mostly maintenance-free.
- caycep 3y agoI am always surprised how much it's taken over video processing tasks (and maybe how Apple lost the plot with Quicktime and such). Would def be interesting if someone could write up a history of the project so far. I wonder how much industry input into the OSS commits there are (like MS/IBM into linux, postgres, etc)
- DavidPiper 3y ago> devices were far more picky I agree with you in general, but it still annoys the crap out of me that QuickTime Player on macOS still won't load completely valid videos. My basic "QuickTime compliant" options are: -tag:v hvc1 -c:v libx265 -crf 28 -c:a eac3 Of course for everything else there's VLC.