[ladberg]

I want to love ffmpeg but I honestly can't stand that I have to spend ~15 minutes looking for the magical incantation to get the result I want. After I find it, it works quickly and has good results.

However, it really feels like video editing isn't something that should be done on the command line. Does anyone know of decent GUI frontends to ffmpeg?

[anovikov]

Main trick is that ffmpeg is not really a command line tool. It's a set of libraries - libav* - built in C which lets you do absolutely everything you want with video/media files (and somewhat less successfully, with streaming data too, while for modern applications such as webrtc, ffmpeg sucks).

Command line tool is just a (rather lame) wrapper for (some) of those features.

[cm2187]

If you have one video to edit I agree. As soon as you are talking batch processing, having this massively powerful, free, self-contained executable that is compatible with pretty much any video format on earth is a god bless.

I usually only use a handful of features repeatedly, so I tend to creat some UI for myself to generate the commands. For instance for editing movies I download, removing audio streams I don’t want, adding subtitles, changing defaults, overwriting metadata (title, etc).

But dealing with all features would be a challenge. Handbrake is one attempt I can think of, but it is still kind of specialised.

[dylan604]

if you are trying to think of ffmpeg as a traditional editor, then yes it is the wrong tool. if you want to programmatically process video/audio/etc, then it is a god send. if you have 100s, 1000s, or more videos that all have different encoding parameters (framesize,framerate,etc) where all of them need a logo or two or three prepended/appended, it would take human ops in a GUI environment forever to sort them and apply the correct logos. this is a piece of cake script-o-matically with ffprobe and ffmpeg. that's just a simple task barely even making ffmpeg get it's heartbeat up from idle. add text that comes up saying some version of "don't share this video" at timed intervals, add a studio bug, burn-in subtitles, etc. all in the same single command and hands-free. now we're talking time saving.

any new piece of software that doesn't get used frequently will have the same "what's the command again" situation. plus, the filter list is just a web page open next to your terminal away.

[joshschreuder]

Avidemux is a good quick and dirty editor with a fair bit of power

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

[teddyh]

There’s the MystiQ Video Converter: https://github.com/swl-x/MystiQ/

[ohthehugemanate]

Most any video program in linux uses ffmpeg libraries in the back end. I like kdenlive, myself.

But I don't know of anything that sets out to put a gui on all the capabilities of ffmpeg