[dingnuts]

It is nice to use LLMs to generate ffmpeg commands, because those can be pretty tricky, but really, you wouldn't have just used the man page before?

That explains a lot about Django that the author is allergic to man pages lol

[ben_w]

I remember when I was a kid, people asking a teacher how to spell a word, and the answer was generally "look it up in a dictionary"… which you can only do if you already have shortlist of possible spellings.

*nix man pages are the same: if you already know which tool can solve your problem, they're easy to use. But you have to already have a shortlist of tools that can solve your problem, before you even know which man pages to read.

[adastra22]

That’s what GNU info is for, of course.

[082349872349872]

man -k (or apropos)

[ben_w]

`apropos` would itself be an example of a *nix tool that I didn't know existed and therefore wouldn't have known to find out more about.

[simonw]

I just took a look, and the man page DOES explain how to do that!

... on line 3,218: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6fc05ea7392c5fb8a5621d65e0ed0...

(I am very confident I am not the only person who has been deterred by ffmpeg's legendarily complex command-line interface. I feel no shame about this at all.)

[lexh]

To be a little more fair... that example is tidily slotted into the EXAMPLES section, under the heading "You can extract images from a video, or create a video from many images".

I don't think most people read the man pages top to bottom. And even if they did, then for as much grief as you're giving ffmpeg, llm has an even larger burden... no man page and the docs weigh in at over 8k lines.

I get the general point that ffmpeg is a powerful, complex tool... but this is a weird fight to pick.

[simonw]

I could not be more confident that "ffmpeg is difficult to figure out" is not a weird fight to pick. It's notorious!

[quesera]

Ffmpeg is genuinely complicated! And the CLI is convoluted (in justifiable, and unfortunate ways).

But if you approach ffmpeg from the perspective of "I know this is possible", you are always correct, and can almost always reach the "how" in a handful of minutes.

Whether that's worth it or not, will vary. :)

[otabdeveloper4]

The correct solution here would have been to feed the man page to an LLM summarizer.

Alas instead of correct and easy solutions to problems we are focused on sci-fi robot assitant bullshit.