Aaand it's minimally working, so: https://ffmpeg.app is now live!
Use FFmpeg recipes without fiddling with the command line!
Consider this an early beta. There's still a ton missing:
- Ability to tweak the command line (i.e. hand editing, or selectors)
- Proper mobile styles
- About, disclaimers, etc
- Many more command recipes
- Better accessibility
- "Bug fixes and performance improvements"
But, it's doing the thing!
Some disclaimers:
- In the above video it works super duper fast because removing an audio track is basically just a copy. Other things usually take longer.
- Files are not uploaded anywhere. Your content NEVER leaves your computer. It's all processed on the client side.
- There's no user tracking, scripts, Google fonts, etc. A bunch of JS, but mostly local; the only exception is the FFmpeg wasm, which comes from unpkg.com (it's 31mb, too scary to host myself).
- No AI! (that's a feature)
BTW, issues are welcomed:
https://github.com/zeh/ffmpeg.app/issues
And I track a roadmap of sorts here:
https://github.com/users/zeh/projects/2/views/1
I should have this better exposed in the README of the repo soon to make it easier for anyone to provide feedback.
Cons:
It is a web app, an app built for your phoneOS to use off network would probably not be allowed in an official App Store.
Serving host has a reputation for being highly untrustworthy regarding privacy, etc.
If these opinions are wrong, please refute them, but they show up fairly early in the response thread.
@Chancerubbage Not exactly sure what you're talking about.
Everything is processed in the client side. What's the privacy concern here?
@claus Yeah, honestly, that's mostly what I use it for. Was tired of copying & pasting the same thing every time I need a decent web-sized video with faststart, etc.
Right now it's a bit hardcoded (always same quality & speed when creating mp4) but once I have the selectors it should be easier to change.
@wader My hope is that this becomes a bit like that. I've always wanted something of the sort, hence this project.
It's just a start, but once there's more recipes, some selection, editing commands, previews, that sort of stuff, it can be that.
Attached: 1 image Why didn't I start using #jupyter bash kernel earlier? #ffmpeg #jq #fq
@wader Wow, this is amazing.
I do think FFmpeg commands would work well as a graph - I sorta assume that's how it is, internally. Would be an interesting exercise.
@lvk @zeh wow that looks cool! so it was something even more generic for building shell pipelines with "plugins" for ffmpeg etc? how was the interaction with ffmpeg done, using the cli binary?
remember spending quite a lot of time to somehow map errors from ffmpeg to show up in the graph to explain why things don't work but never really felt stable or useful enough
So back then I've basically built a ffmpeg-scanner (it would parse the output of 'ffmpeg -filters' iirc) and generate node-definitions from that.
In theory all was awesome, in practice some sort of meta-nodes would've been better (which would generate snippets of ffmpeg-filtergraph which deal with all the edgecases like format-conversion, same-resolution restrictions etc).
@wader It's not super graph-y, but the way I'm building the command-line definitions, I hope it'll be easy to turn stuff on and off, and select from templates, so one can build some mini-programs-ish things that can take a bunch of options and output a video/audio based on a common task.
Not very obvious now, but once there's optional stuff, predefined selections, etc, should make more sense: https://github.com/zeh/ffmpeg.app/blob/c491a3b7c419f98d915cfadcb910979025ca87b1/src/utils/commands/commands.json
@Exagone313 Yeah, I only have a selected number of entries. I should have a richer list later, including adding better tags.
I know about the FF bug on Android (it's my main mobile browser) - it's something about it not being able to handle large blobs in memory. I'll need to investigate more. Mostly works in Chrome Android FWIW.
@louisrcouture So it doesn't run in the server, it runs in your own browser via a local FFmpeg copy! It's 100% private, I can never see the contents (or even the file names).
That said, I do need a "copy" button to copy the command line to the clipboard without any selector/input shenanigans. It's always faster in the command line anyway, so some people could still prefer that.
Thanks! This look super helpful.
@viv thanks for testing. Running on phones is giving all sorts of errors, mostly due to file sizes being a bit more than what browsers are willing to handle locally. ☹️
In your case it's surprisingly failing gracefully (rather than crashing catastrophically) - the JS console might be showing the specific error it's encountering. Feel free to share with me if you want, would give me more clues.
I'll investigate more soon when I work on the mobile styles, might need some specialized changes.
@viv it's a good suggestion actually. Thanks. Added to the list.
It needs to get better at parsing the logs from ffmpeg in any case.
@zeh it seems like one of the problems here is that the h264 codec is trying to malloc and failing (see attached screenshot)
i'm guessing that @ffmpeg/ffmpeg is the single-threaded version that starts with 32mb allocated and can grow. the multithreaded version preallocates its (1gb) heap and would fail to be created at all, instead of failing partway.
256mb appears to be a safe initial size on ios but this isn't a primary source
i couldn't find any details about what emscripten does if MAXIMUM_MEMORY isn't set but ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH is. i started a build of ffmpeg.wasm with that set to 1gb and will probably try that at some point
@viv nice! Very insightful.
And yeah, I'm wondering if I'll need my own builds for mobile clients with some tweaks. In FF Android for example it just crashes entirely. So I might need some tweaks there.
Will need to look into that soon.
@viv thanks for testing, will try some more. Bummer.
Planning on exposing the error message correctly soon too, at the very least.
@zeh This is super-cool! Really shows the power of #WebAssembly
It's about one layer of abstraction away from a completely different #idea I had to make an in-browser meme editor via WASM ffmpeg. Would love to see someone take the same approach there.
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