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AI has made FFmpeg easily usable to the mere mortal - that alone is a technological revolution.

by DrNosferatu 1y ago

kylehotchkiss 1y ago
Total AI expenditure justified
- DrNosferatu 1y ago
  But synthesizing FFmpeg commands is not the total gain from “AI expenditure”, is it? There are infinite similar use cases. I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through. - Has Amazon’s Kiro truly managed this? - What other efforts are there in this direction?
  - skydhash 1y ago
    > I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through. AI is a step too late. We already have a solution. They are called SDKs and Framewoks. Where the few things left is the business logic which you'll gather in meeting. The coding is mostly tabbing (for completion), copy pasting (you already have something 80% similar), and refactoring (a new integration is needed, and the static configuration isn't going to cut it). A lot of the coding work is hunting down bugs (because you assumed instead of knowing) and moving things around in a way that won't make the whole thing crashes.
    - DrNosferatu 1y ago
      That’s not true for me at all: AI gives me near-instant distillation of tomes of documentation, that before, I would have to fairly understand to make progress. Now that has become instant and near effortless - if this isn’t a technological revolution, then I don’t know what is. (AND it writes - at least - the boilerplate code for you) Beyond the internet and the microcomputer (we’re clearly at this level nowadays), I think AI is on its way to become a technological revolution as big as Electricity - watch this space.
rpdillon 1y ago
Can vouch. Had an .mkv that browsers wouldn't play, and asked AI to give me a command line that maximized compatibility so I could stream it from CopyParty without folks on my network having to mount it and stream to VLC, rather than just play in the browser. This is one of those cases where I couldn't really verify that what it suggested was correct: ffmpeg -i file.mkv -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4 I could look up all those flags, but I haven't. But the command did seem to work! I'm sure the HN crowd can critique. =) And so I'm curious about the concept you're getting at: command line tools that offer natural language interfaces. Maybe the command line can become more broadly accessible, especially if designed with that that use case in mind.
- reactordev 1y ago
  For sure. You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again, converted the audio, set the apple mov headers, and spit that sucker out as an mp4 with probably half the resolution in pixel density but hey - it played. I would try it again without the pix_fmt flag, the vf flag (and string). No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?). The video filter scaling definitely needs to go if you want it to be as close to the original resolution. Cool part is, it worked. Even with a bad flag or two, ffmpeg said “Hold my beer”
  - teraflop 1y ago
    > You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again No, that's not what that command does. It performs a single rescaling that resizes the video dimensions to the next lower multiple of 2. e.g. it will resize an 801x601 pixel video to 800x600. If the video size is already an even number of pixels, it's a no-op and doesn't lose any detail. If the video size isn't already even, then the rescaling is necessary because H.264 doesn't support odd dimensions. > No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?). It's documented here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#Options-40 https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#Options-40
- DrNosferatu 1y ago
eddiewithzato 1y ago
Yea so basically just a better search engine. Not what the VC were promised though

AI has made FFmpeg easily usable to the mere mortal - that alone is a technological revolution.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

Total AI expenditure justified

DrNosferatu 1y ago
But synthesizing FFmpeg commands is not the total gain from “AI expenditure”, is it? There are infinite similar use cases. I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through. - Has Amazon’s Kiro truly managed this? - What other efforts are there in this direction?
- skydhash 1y ago
  > I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through. AI is a step too late. We already have a solution. They are called SDKs and Framewoks. Where the few things left is the business logic which you'll gather in meeting. The coding is mostly tabbing (for completion), copy pasting (you already have something 80% similar), and refactoring (a new integration is needed, and the static configuration isn't going to cut it). A lot of the coding work is hunting down bugs (because you assumed instead of knowing) and moving things around in a way that won't make the whole thing crashes.
  - DrNosferatu 1y ago
    That’s not true for me at all: AI gives me near-instant distillation of tomes of documentation, that before, I would have to fairly understand to make progress. Now that has become instant and near effortless - if this isn’t a technological revolution, then I don’t know what is. (AND it writes - at least - the boilerplate code for you) Beyond the internet and the microcomputer (we’re clearly at this level nowadays), I think AI is on its way to become a technological revolution as big as Electricity - watch this space.

rpdillon 1y ago

Can vouch. Had an .mkv that browsers wouldn't play, and asked AI to give me a command line that maximized compatibility so I could stream it from CopyParty without folks on my network having to mount it and stream to VLC, rather than just play in the browser. This is one of those cases where I couldn't really verify that what it suggested was correct: ffmpeg -i file.mkv -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4 I could look up all those flags, but I haven't. But the command did seem to work! I'm sure the HN crowd can critique. =) And so I'm curious about the concept you're getting at: command line tools that offer natural language interfaces. Maybe the command line can become more broadly accessible, especially if designed with that that use case in mind.

reactordev 1y ago
For sure. You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again, converted the audio, set the apple mov headers, and spit that sucker out as an mp4 with probably half the resolution in pixel density but hey - it played. I would try it again without the pix_fmt flag, the vf flag (and string). No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?). The video filter scaling definitely needs to go if you want it to be as close to the original resolution. Cool part is, it worked. Even with a bad flag or two, ffmpeg said “Hold my beer”
- teraflop 1y ago
  > You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again No, that's not what that command does. It performs a single rescaling that resizes the video dimensions to the next lower multiple of 2. e.g. it will resize an 801x601 pixel video to 800x600. If the video size is already an even number of pixels, it's a no-op and doesn't lose any detail. If the video size isn't already even, then the rescaling is necessary because H.264 doesn't support odd dimensions. > No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?). It's documented here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#Options-40 https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#Options-40
DrNosferatu 1y ago

eddiewithzato 1y ago

Yea so basically just a better search engine. Not what the VC were promised though