20 years later it's still a goto. Great tool.
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?
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.
& $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 $destPathI 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.
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.
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.
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)
Being cheeky of course here. FFmpeg is great. An AI assistant was what I needed to execute my ~12 FFmpeg commands per year though, with ease and speed.
I mean I've only done it once with ffmpeg but it felt so good
1. ffmpeg exposes all of its options through the CLI, and there are a lot of options. So it's probably always going to be completely undiscoverable. It really needs a GUI to be usable, but that's a project in itself (I guess the project is Handbrake).
2. They probably didn't put a lot of work into the UX of the CLI since it's an open source project.
3. Backwards compatibility.
There's a million terrible websites that offer file conversion services. They're ad-ridden, with god-knows-what privacy/security postures. There's little reason for users to need to upload their files to a third-party when they can do it locally. But getting them to download fiddly technical software is tough - and they're right to mistrust it.
So, there's a WASM version of ffmpeg, already working and hosted at Netlify [1]. It downloads the WASM bundle to your browser and you can run conversions/transformations as you wish, in your browser. Sandboxed and pretty performant too!
If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above.
Browsers are annoying. They constrict the designer, they constrict the user, they're overly complicated, slow, bloated... I don't know why people keep pushing them to do things they are bad at.
I wish 20 years ago we'd made a concerted effort to make Java suck less. We'd have the universal applications everyone wants but nobody wants to put effort into. But the web was new-ish, and people didn't realize that hypertext document viewers would become an entire application platform and mini OS.
What I'd really like to see is something like FlatPak, but for all platforms. Basically it would be containerized GUI apps, but one repository for one app that serves all platforms. On Android, MacOS, Windows, etc, you would run your "flatpak add https://some/repository/ my-app && flatpak pull my-app && flakpak run my-app" (but in a GUI, like an App Store you control). And that would pull the image for your platform and run it. Since it's containerized, you get all the dependencies, it's multi-arch, & you control how it executes in a sandbox. You could use the same programming language per platform, or different languages; same widgets, different widgets; it wouldn't matter because each platform just downloads and runs an image for that platform. This wouldn't stop us from having/making "a better Java", but it would make it easier to support all platforms, distribute applications securely, update them, run them in a sandbox, etc. Imagine being able to ship a single app to Windows and iOS users that's just a shell script and 'xdialog'. Or if you prefer, a single Go app. Or a sprawling Python or Node.js app. Whatever you want. The user gets a single way to install and run an app on any platform, and developers can support multiple platforms any way they want. No more "how do I develop for iOS vs Windows"; just write your app and push your container.
Many users are in environments where its not possible to download new software (schools, work places, universities).
The browser has its disadvantages, but it is the most widely-deployed sandboxed execution environment providing incredibly easy distribution of software.
The presets are useful but when I'm converting an old WMV or some other ancient format I want to know that I'm not leaving anything behind.
FFMPEG isn't complicated (its as complicated as any other CLI tool), it's that video encoding/decoding specifically is a hard problem space that you have to explicitly learn to better understand what ffmpeg can do. I think if someone spent an hour learning about video codecs, bitrates, and container formats, they would immediately feel "better" at ffmpeg despite not learning more about the tool itself.
No matter how nice you make it, it will probably still lose the SEO battle against the shitty ad-ladden sites fighting to win top place for google searches of "convert X to mp3"/etc.
I had to merge a bunch of PDFs for a rental application recently and it was painful. Having to upload very sensitive docs, every site being a funnel to their paid version, etc.
> https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.3.0/technical/source-formats....
"One of HandBrake’s strengths is its ability to open a wide variety of video formats. HandBrake uses FFmpeg under the hood and generally can open whatever FFmpeg will, in addition to disc-based formats like DVD and Blu-ray."
The options Handbrake exposes are essentially the ffmpeg flags. The built in presets in Handbrake are generally pretty sensible IMO and I've rarely had to deviate.
Of course, a website would be better for smaller conversion jobs (in case you have browser restarts or whatnot). Desktop apps can block computer restarts to a greater degree than websites.
Keeping the affected code visible somewhere could be useful for research purposes, but you don't want it where people or automations might unwittingly use it. If the official sources where the only place this could be found then it might be reasonable to expect them to put up a side copy for this reason, but given how many forks and other copies there will be out there I don't think this is necessary and they are better off working on removing known compromises (and attempting to verify there are no others that were slipped in) to return things to a good state.
A week or so is not a lot of time.
right now I'm sure it's a temporary measure, to limit the downloading of sources.
but I really worry that later this will become normalized first, after every exposed hack withrdraw source availability for a little bit aftewards, just while 'they' check for other attacks or whatever
later on, it'll take longer and longer to put the source back up. but let's hope this is merely my overactive paranoia and everything will be fine open source is still ok.
There is value in making sure (potentially) compromised code doesn't just get used normally, but I agree that shouldn't mean totally blocking access to it in most cases.
Why would one want a "Safe FFMpeg Wrapper"?
Edit: Got it, provides a rust API library to ffmpeg. Thanks @CJefferson.
What’s the alternative? I could wrap the C API, and then try to make a nice rust interface from that, but then that’s exactly what this package does, so I don’t want to repeat the work.
However, it seems that many programs opt to instead shell out to the ffmpeg CLI. I think it’s usually simpler than linking against the library and to avoid licensing issues. But there are some cases where the CLI doesn’t cut it.
What I do is take several diverse short video segments, like 100, concatenate them into 4 segments (example 23+24+26+27 since they have diverse lengths) and then xstack them into a 2-by-2 mosaic video.
Before, I was doing it in a single stage, but now, after some advice, I do it in 5 stages: 4 concatenate stages and 1 xstack stage.
I have not profiled/timed it so see which is faster, but it works pretty well, although I often have a lot of different weird warnings.
Just out of curiosity.. what use do you have for a 2-by-2 mosaic video?
Also, it seems there is currently one in progress to drop the "6" qualifier on the ffmpeg binaries <https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/23315/files> so it'll be fascinating to see if any new ffmpeg7 then subsequently puts the "7" back, beginning the cycle again
(I'm not a MacPorts maintainer, but I've been burnt by ffmpeg API changes a couple times myself before).
brew tap bsiegel/tap
Not at all the same as running a 4.x release.
I'm making some youtube videos where I play through Demon's Souls flipping a coin to decide to equip items or not, and I wanted to have an onscreen coin flip animation and sound effect. With some effort, I created a transparent set of frames for the animation. Then with ffmpeg's filter_complex I was able to add the image sequence as a video stream, overlay it over the original video, and add a sound effect. That's on top of the existing subtitles, audio channel merging, and video resizing/compression. All in a single (long!) ffmpeg cli command.
ffmpeg is one of the true wonders of FOSS.
I'm not saying the CLI is easy to learn, but once you do learn it, you have a lot of power at your fingertips.
*for some codecs, and with limitations.
If you really want to give VVC a try, better stay with version 6.1.1 as it's the last one which has patches for enabling VVdec. You won't be able to apply them to version 7.0/git master:
https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/vvenc/wiki/FFmpeg-Integrati...
I know they use some of the same encoding libraries.
Use ChatGPT to help you find the right command for your need.
I would love a “unless you’re a pro with hyper specific needs, forget these 90% of arguments and only use this 10% in this way” type of guide.
But then again, my experience is that ChatGPT is dreadful at everything but the simplest anything.
That would give you hallucinated commands, not commands that actually exist or make sense. Better read documentation or ask experienced humans.
ChatGPT can help with learning a lot now but the mailing lists are incredible sources of kind and wonderful (and incredibly knowledgeable) people… go there!
Handbrake, Permute are super as mentioned… I’ve put down a couple to add to the list.)
Don’t think anything exists like XLD for FFMPEG video where you can just drop a file in set the quality and codec and get the exact same dimensiond file out every time.
Crazy how much DirectX (DXVA) support got added.
- DXV DXT1 encoder
- LEAD MCMP decoder
- EVC decoding using external library libxevd
- EVC encoding using external library libxeve
- QOA decoder and demuxer
- aap filter
- demuxing, decoding, filtering, encoding, and muxing in the
- ffmpeg CLI now all run in parallel
- enable gdigrab device to grab a window using the hwnd=HANDLER syntax
- IAMF raw demuxer and muxer
- D3D12VA hardware accelerated H264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, MPEG-2 and VC1 decoding
- tiltandshift filter
- qrencode filter and qrencodesrc source
- quirc filter
- lavu/eval: introduce randomi() function in expressions
- VVC decoder (experimental)
- fsync filter
- Raw Captions with Time (RCWT) closed caption muxer
- ffmpeg CLI -bsf option may now be used for input as well as output
- ffmpeg CLI options may now be used as -/opt <path>, which is equivalent
- to -opt <contents of file <path>>
- showinfo bitstream filter
- a C11-compliant compiler is now required; note that this requirement
- will be bumped to C17 in the near future, so consider updating your
- build environment if it lacks C17 support
- Change the default bitrate control method from VBR to CQP for QSV encoders.
- removed deprecated ffmpeg CLI options -psnr and -map_channel
- DVD-Video demuxer, powered by libdvdnav and libdvdread
- ffprobe -show_stream_groups option
- ffprobe (with -export_side_data film_grain) now prints film grain metadata
- AEA muxer
- ffmpeg CLI loopback decoders
- Support PacketTypeMetadata of PacketType in enhanced flv format
- ffplay with hwaccel decoding support (depends on vulkan renderer via libplacebo)
- dnn filter libtorch backend
- Android content URIs protocol
- AOMedia Film Grain Synthesis 1 (AFGS1)
- RISC-V optimizations for AAC, FLAC, JPEG-2000, LPC, RV4.0, SVQ, VC1, VP8, and more
- Loongarch optimizations for HEVC decoding
- Important AArch64 optimizations for HEVC
- IAMF support inside MP4/ISOBMFF
- Support for HEIF/AVIF still images and tiled still images
- Dolby Vision profile 10 support in AV1
- Support for Ambient Viewing Environment metadata in MP4/ISOBMFF
- HDR10 metadata passthrough when encoding with libx264, libx265, and libsvtav1
> dnn filter libtorch backend
What's ffmpeg's plan regarding ML based filters? When looking through the filter documentation it seems like filters use three different backends: tensorflow, torch, and openvino. Doesn't seem optimal, is there any discussion about consolidating on one backend?
ML filters need model files, and the filters take a path to a model file as one of their arguments. This makes them really difficult to use, if you're lucky you can find a suitable model and download somewhere, otherwise you need to find a separate model training project and dataset and run that first. Are there any plans on streamlining ML filters and model handling for ffmpeg? Maybe a model file repository with an option of installing these in an official models path on the system?
Most image and video research use ML now, but I don't get the impression that ffmpeg tries to integrate the modern technologies well yet. Being able to do for instance spatial and temporal super resolution using standard ffmpeg filters would be a big improvement, and I think things like automatic subtitles using whisper would be a good fit too. But it should start with a coherent ML strategy regarding inference backend and model management.
I think I read about this a few months ago but don't remember the details. What exactly does this do? Does it result in faster encoding/decoding if you have multiple filter graphs (for example a single cmd line that transcodes to new audio, extracts image, creates a low res)
> - ffmpeg CLI loopback decoders
No idea what this is...
Edit: threading => https://ffmpeg.org//index.html#cli_threading, loopback => https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Loopback-decoders
Loopback decoders are a nice concept. So could I use this to create a single ffmpeg command to extract images periodically (say 1/s) and then merge them into a horizontal strip (using the loopback decoder for this part)?
I wonder if this also means that Chrome and Edge will be able to use this acceleration for their ffmpeg backend (instead of relying on MediaFoundation)?
I think I did updated my code with the new channel layout API. But it was a year ago at least. There is another API which is supposed to change, the seeking API but I wonder if it is now stable enough to be used.