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The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of the
by HelloUsername 10mo ago
The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.
- Tempest1981 10mo agoOne that older AI struggled with was the "bounce" effect: play from 0:00 to 0:03, then backwards from 0:03 to 0:00, then repeat 5 times.
- geysersam 10mo agoJust tried it and got this, is it correct? > Write an ffmpeg command that implements the "bounce" effect: play from 0:00 to 0:03, then backwards from 0:03 to 0:00, then repeat 5 times. ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \ -filter_complex " [0:v]trim=0:3,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[f]; [f]reverse[r]; [f][r]concat=n=2:v=1:a=0[b]; [b]loop=loop=4:size=150:start=0 " \ output.mp4
- Tempest1981 10mo agoThanks, but no luck. I tested it on a 3 second video, and got a 6 second video. I.e. it bounced 1 time, not 5 times. Maybe this should be an AI reasoning test. Here is what eventually worked, iirc (10 bounces): ffmpeg -i input.mkv -filter_complex "split=2[fwd][rev_in]; [rev_in]reverse[rev]; [fwd][rev]concat=n=2,split=10[p1][p2][p3][p4][p5][p6][p7][p8][p9][p10]; [p1][p2][p3][p4][p5][p6][p7][p8][p9][p10]concat=n=10[outv]" -map "[outv]" -an output.mkv
- Terr_ 10mo agoAs pessimistic about it as I am, I do think LLMs have a place in helping people turn their text description into formal directives. (Search terms, command-line, SQL, etc.) ... Provided that the user sees what's being made for them and can confirm it and (hopefully) learn the target "language." Tutor, not a do-for-you assistant.
- eviks 10mo agoThe "provided" isn't provided, of course, especially the learning part, that's not what you'd turn to AI for vs more reliable tutoring alternatives
- left-struck 10mo agoI agree apart from the learning part. The thing is unless you have some very specific needs where you need to use ffmpeg a lot, there’s just no need to learn this stuff. If I have to touch it once a year I have much better things to spend my time learning than ffmpeg command
- serial_dev 10mo agoThere is no universe where I would like to spend brain power on learning ffmpeg commands by heart.
- skydhash 10mo agoNo one learns those. What people do is just learning the UX of the cli and the terminology (codec, opus, bitrate, sampling,…)
- rolfus 10mo agoAgreed. I have a bunch of little command-line apps that I use 0.3 to 3 times a year* and I'm never going to memorize the commands or syntax for those. I'll be happy to remember the names of these tools, so I can actually find them on my own computer. * - Just a few days ago I used ImageMagick for the first time in at least three years. I downloaded it just to find that I already had it installed.
- lukeschlather 10mo agoThe thing about ffmpeg is there's no substitute for learning. It's pretty common that something simple like "ff convert" simply doesn't work and you have to learn about resolution, color space, profiles, or container formats. An LLM can help but earlier this year I spent a lot of time looking at these sorts of edge cases, and I can easily make any LLM wildly hallucinate by asking questions about how to use ffmpeg to handle particular files.
- beepbooptheory 10mo agoBut doesnt something like this interface kind of show the inefficiency of this? Like we can all agree ffmpeg is somewhat esoteric and LLMs are probably really great at it, but at the end of the day if you can get 90% of what you need with just some good porcelain, why waste the energy spinning up the GPU?
- imiric 10mo agoBecause the porcelain is purpose built for a specific use case. If you need something outside of what its author intended, you'll need to get your hands dirty. And, realistically, compute and power is cheap for getting help with one-off CLI commands.
- pixelpoet 10mo agoRequiring the installation of a massive kraken like node.js and npm to run a commandline executable hardly screams efficiency...
- RadiozRadioz 10mo agoThat's a deficiency with this particular implementation, not an inherent disadvantage to the method
- chpatrick 10mo agoBecause FFmpeg is a swiss army knife with a million blades and I don't think any easy interface is really going to do the job well. It's a great LLM use case.
- skydhash 10mo agoBut you only need to find the correct tool once and mark it in some way. Aka write a wrapper script, jot down some notes. You are acting like you’re forced to use the cli each time.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago
- corobo 10mo agoLLMs are an amazing advance in natural language parsing. The problem is someone decided that and the contents of Wikipedia was all something needs to be intelligent haha
- madeofpalk 10mo agoThe confusion was thinking that language is the same thing as intelligence.
- Marazan 10mo agoThis seems like a glib one liner but I do think it is profoundly insightful as to how some people approach thinking about LLMs. It is almost like there is hardwiring in our brains that makes us instinctively correlate language generation with intelligence and people cannot separate the two. It would be like if for the first calculators ever produced instead of responding with 8 to the input 4 + 4 = printed out "Great question! The answer to your question is 7.98" and that resulted in a slew of people proclaiming the arrival of AGI (or, more seriously, the ELIZA Effect is a thing).
- Kiro 10mo agoYou and me are great examples of that. We are both extremely stupid and yet we can speak.
- vovavili 10mo agoCan attest.
- andrepd 10mo agoAnd reddit, that bastion of human achievement.