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There is a lot of very useful functionality in ffmpeg/libav. That doesn't make using it pleasurable.

by jfb 11y ago

astrange 11y ago
Were you trying to use it from the API or the command line? Either way, yes. Elenril and others were doing good work cleaning up the API when I last paid attention years ago, but there's a lot of surprise technical issues esp. in libavformat that it has to cover up. (Like, PTS/DTS in avi. Like operations that are instant in some file types might be real-time minutes in others.) As for the command line, major customers tended to not ever give feedback on it, and it was maintained by Michael who tended to use the same code-review standards on the UI code as on the inside of a video encoder. This made it quite difficult to ever get anywhere. That's one of the reasons there was a fork back then. Of course, there's deep technical problems there too - you can tell it to do all kinds of things that are actually really hard, and it will kind of half-heartedly do them then fail. Try converting a Matroska file to MP4 without re-encoding it; you'll get a weird error. That one weird error would take more than a year of developer time to fix.
- jfb 11y ago
  Yeah, both. In fairness, the last time I tried using the API was before the libav split, and I have no doubt that the situation has improved; the command line, while almost ludicrously powerful, retains a lot of terrible habits -- silent defaults, mutually contradictory options, &c. I have somewhere a much more prescriptive python library that sits on top of the command line API, but I think it'd be really great if there were a "strict" mode for the CLI -- no more implicits, no more silent rejiggering of options. If you don't totally account for your input and output, it's an error. Then, there could be a much more forgiving and intelligent front end to the front end that allowed for things like "-i foo.avi ./foo.mp4", making best guesses at each stage of the pipeline.

There is a lot of very useful functionality in ffmpeg/libav. That doesn't make using it pleasurable.

by jfb 11y ago

There is a lot of very useful functionality in ffmpeg/libav. That doesn't make using it pleasurable.

Were you trying to use it from the API or the command line? Either way, yes. Elenril and others were doing good work cleaning up the API when I last paid attention years ago, but there's a lot of surprise technical issues esp. in libavformat that it has to cover up. (Like, PTS/DTS in avi. Like operations that are instant in some file types might be real-time minutes in others.) As for the command line, major customers tended to not ever give feedback on it, and it was maintained by Michael who tended to use the same code-review standards on the UI code as on the inside of a video encoder. This made it quite difficult to ever get anywhere. That's one of the reasons there was a fork back then. Of course, there's deep technical problems there too - you can tell it to do all kinds of things that are actually really hard, and it will kind of half-heartedly do them then fail. Try converting a Matroska file to MP4 without re-encoding it; you'll get a weird error. That one weird error would take more than a year of developer time to fix.

jfb 11y ago
Yeah, both. In fairness, the last time I tried using the API was before the libav split, and I have no doubt that the situation has improved; the command line, while almost ludicrously powerful, retains a lot of terrible habits -- silent defaults, mutually contradictory options, &c. I have somewhere a much more prescriptive python library that sits on top of the command line API, but I think it'd be really great if there were a "strict" mode for the CLI -- no more implicits, no more silent rejiggering of options. If you don't totally account for your input and output, it's an error. Then, there could be a much more forgiving and intelligent front end to the front end that allowed for things like "-i foo.avi ./foo.mp4", making best guesses at each stage of the pipeline.