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by maupin 805 days ago
ffmpeg is such a joy to use, once you make it over the very steep learning curve.

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.

1 comments

and every other non-sadist would've done this in 2 seconds in <insert 500+ FOSS video editors>. not sure how wrangling a byzantine CLI is a joy to use.
In my case I'm working with very large uncompressed video. Files that are 1 hour and 300+ GB in size. I tried using Kdenlive but it choked.

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.

> Files that are 1 hour and 300+ GB in size. I tried using Kdenlive but it choked.

Well if you do want to do any notable editing, it should be easy to make proxy videos to solve that problem. A few clicks to enable, even.