Owen McManus
mccFFMPEG is so great… whatever it is you need to do with a video file, all you have to do is type "ffmpeg [thing i need to do]" into Google, copy-paste your first result, and then it doesn't fucking work
beetlejuice's ghoulish wife@mcc I BARKED with laughter at this
mav 
huxley(fur) / Laelia 🔜 Furcationland DeadDog
Tóth Gábor Baltazár@mcc their documentation for both API and CLI is a mess, if you can even find it
I had to wrestle it years ago when I did raw video on a phone
mika 
:verif@tthbaltazar @mcc i once found documentation for it on a furniture repair website
Le Néandertal se sent las, las@tthbaltazar @mcc the man page is insufficient but the documentation on the Web sit is quite ok
skategoat 🐐 🇵🇸@mcc Even better ask a know it all llm
it also doesn't work
Jon Haile@mcc oh god yes
Laurie Voss@mcc Now try ChatGPT
@seldo ChatGPT reports success regardless of WHAT flags I give it! This is the future of software
Mark W. Alexander
Jay 🆘@mcc It feels like the syntax is different every year when I need to use it again.
@jsit heh remember that like two year period when suddenly you had to switch from calling it "ffmpeg" to "avconv" and then all of a sudden you were supposed to switch back
Joshua@mcc obligatory https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM
Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast
Boba Yaga@mcc Honestly getting command line options that don't work sounds like an ideal use case for LLMs
eldritch anchovy@mcc oh, also
last year I learned that if you use npm to install the ffmpeg binary in alpine linux, ffmpeg will be 🎵 completely fucking incapable of doing dns resolution 🎵
bob@mcc job security for life, I hate it
e. hashman 
@mcc on the one hand, you are absolutely right. But on the other, https://toot.cat/@ehashman/109578772250791187
e. hashman :kittyfied: (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 video this is perfection. I can't stop. parents do not let me near your ffmpeg
JoeY ☕️🎮✍️🏽@mcc Now I feel lucky. I've had some sort of successful output when I used it a few times last year. 😅
Jason Petersen (he)@mcc every time I use it I’m like “someone seems to have had a lot of intent around how these flags operate and it seems very deliberate, but none of it is intuitive and I will never learn it oh well”
Hobson Lane
Wojciech Mosiejczuk@mcc I hated this so much I literally built a GUI around my most common use case: trimming videos without recompressing
Becca 🏳️⚧️ 🇺🇦 🇸🇩 🇵🇸@mcc thank the Goddess for Handbrake 😉
Ridley @ WATCH LYCORECO@mcc imagine the power you'd have if you actually learned the syntax (it's me, I learned the syntax)
Kit Bashir
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@Unixbigot @mcc @aeva this is the number one benefit of switching from miniDLNA to Jellyfin for me - no more Python scripts that pull data from online metadata and call ffmpeg to update the in-file metadata
Andreas Grois@mcc I'm a long time mencoder user. Not because I would consider the tool itself better than the alternatives, but because of its documentation.
Viraptor@mcc so you're saying it's like imagemagick, but for video? :-(
Patrick Reynolds
Ben Zanin@mcc I _desperately_ wish ffmpeg had its current brevity-centric inscrutable order-dependent command line parsing, whatever, it's fine... AS WELL AS a nicely versioned, documented, schema-backed invocation file format.
Stewart Russell@mcc sox(1) has entered the chat
Ax=b@mcc ah, but it is consistent!
nick@mcc sometimes my office is cold and I want to run every fan on my computer for a long time and accidentally produce a video the size of a postage stamp but a gigabit per second bit rate.
New product: LLMPEG.
LR@mcc i always walk into the temple of ffmpeg expecting to be impaled by sticks and being rolled over by a boulder, and then miraculously come out unharmed, unimaginable riches in tow
maybe it's because i never ask much
@mcc that said, i keep all my successes in scripts that act as executable documentation. because figuring out how to do something is always archeological work.
Growlph Ibex@mcc Reproducibility like that is hard to find these days