[pmarreck]

Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool.

I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)

[Culonavirus]

> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

[mrandish]

I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.

[RedShift1]

I'm ok with regex, but the ffmpeg manpage, it scares me...

[quectophoton]

Ffmpeg was designed to be unusable if it falls into enemy hands.

[falloon]

I defer understanding FFMPEG arguments to the LLMs.

[lukeschlather]

Regex is only difficult because it's complicated, the primitives are all sensibly arranged and predictable. FFmpeg is layers of dark magic where the primitives are often inscrutable before you compose them.

[zvr]

I am perfectly at home with regexp, but ffmpeg, magick, and jq are still on the list to master.

[Keyframe]

with gemini-cli and claude-cli you can now prompt while it prompts ffmpeg, and it does work.

[conradev]

Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!

[turnsout]

Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.

[lukeschlather]

It's funny because GPU stuff like what this article is about is where the LLMs totally fall apart. I can make any LLM produce volumes hallucinations at the drop of a hat by asking it how to construct ffmpeg commands that use hardware acceleration.

[profsummergig]

Just seeking a clarification on how this would be done:

One would use gemini-cli (or claude-cli),

- and give a natural language prompt to gemini (or claude) on what processing needs to be done,

- with the correct paths to FFmpeg and the media file,

- and g-cli (or c-cli) would take it from there.

Is this correct?

[logicalmind]

Another option is to use a non-cli LLM and ask it to produce a script (bash/ps1) that uses ffmpeg to do X, Y, and Z to your video files. If using a chat LLM it will often provide suggestions or ask questions to improve your processing as well. I do this often and the results are quite good.

[RedShift1]

Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.

[profsummergig]

Thank you.

[NSUserDefaults]

Curious to see how quickly each LLM picks up the new codecs/options.

[stevejb]

I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out

[baq]

the canonical (if that's the right word for a 2-year-old technique) solution is to paste the whole manual into the context before asking questions

[xnx]

Gemini can now load context from a URL in the API (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/url-context), but I'm not sure if that has made it to the web interfaces yet.

[agos]

OT, but yours has to be the best username on this site. Props.

[bobsmooth]

Culón is Spanish for big-bottomed, for anyone else wondering.

[jeanlucas]

nope, that would be handling tar balls

ffmpeg right after

[beala]

Tough crowd.

fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent

Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs.

If you want to create a tar, I'm sorry but you're on your own.

[diggan]

I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.

"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!

[mkl]

> tar xzf foobar.tgz

You don't need the z, as xf will detect which compression was used, if any.

Creating is no harder, just use c for create instead, and specify z for gzip compression:

  tar czf archive.tar.gz [filename(s)]

Same with listing contents, with t for tell:

  tar tf archive.tar.gz

[porridgeraisin]

Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls.

The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.

Examples:

  tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x

You never need anything else for the 99% case.

[BeepInABox]

For anyone curious, unless you are running a 'tar' binary from the stone ages, just skip the gunzip and cat invocations. Replace .gz with .xz or other well known file ending for different compression.

  Examples:
    tar -cf archive.tar.gz foo bar  # Create archive.tar.gz from files foo and bar.
    tar -tvf archive.tar.gz         # List all files in archive.tar.gz verbosely.
    tar -xf archive.tar.gz          # Extract all files from archive.tar.gz

[mkl]

> tar -cf archive.tar.gz foo bar

This will create an uncompressed .tar with the wrong name. You need a z option to specify gzip.

[Intermernet]

Apparently this is now automatically determined by the file name, but I still habitually add the flag. 30 years of muscle memory is hard to break!

[sdfsdfgsdgg]

> tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

Surely you mean -t if you wanna list, t for lisT.

l is for check-Links.

     -l, --check-links
             (c and r modes only) Issue a warning message unless all links to each file are archived.

And you don't need to uncompress separately. tar will detect the correct compression algorithm and decompress on its own. No need for that gunzip intermediate step.

[porridgeraisin]

> -l

Whoops, lol.

> on its own

Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.

[sdfsdfgsdgg]

That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.

[tombert]

Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.

[CamperBob2]

What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?

I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.

[diggernet]

A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.

Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...

Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.

[beagle3]

The zip directory itself is uncompressed, and if you have lots of small files with similar names, zipping the zip makes a huge difference. IIRC in the HVSC (C64 SID music archive), the outer zip used to save another 30%.

[fullstop]

zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.

[dns_snek]

Plain old zip is tricky to parse correctly. If you search for them, you can probably find about a dozen rants about all the problems of working with ZIP files.

[aidenn0]

You for got the -z (or -a with a recent gnutar).

[adastra22]

It’s no longer needed. You can leave it out and it auto-detects the file format.

[drivers99]

Except it's tar -t to list, not -l

[porridgeraisin]

Whoops, lol. Well that's unfortunate.

[themafia]

    gzip -dc backup.tar.gz | tar -x

You can skip a step in your pipeline.

[bigstrat2003]

The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.

[encom]

It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?

[mrguyorama]

As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?

Principle of least surprise and all that.

[jeanlucas]

it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference

[fullstop]

I have so much of tar memorized. cpio is super funky to me, though.

[fuzztester]

cpio is not that hard.

A common use case is:

  $ cpio -pdumv args 

See:

  $ man cpio 

and here is an example from its Wikipedia page, under the "Operation and archive format" section, under the Copy subsection:

Copy

Cpio supports a third type of operation which copies files. It is initiated with the pass-through option flag (p). This mode combines the copy-out and copy-in steps without actually creating any file archive. In this mode, cpio reads path names on standard input like the copy-out operation, but instead of creating an archive, it recreates the directories and files at a different location in the file system, as specified by the path given as a command line argument.

This example copies the directory tree starting at the current directory to another path new-path in the file system, preserving files modification times (flag m), creating directories as needed (d), replacing any existing files unconditionally (u), while producing a progress listing on standard output (v):

$ find . -depth -print | cpio -p -dumv new-path

[fullstop]

I think that it's the fact that it requires a pipe to work and that you add files by feeding stdin that throw me for a loop.

I also use it very infrequently compared to tar -- mostly in conjunction with swupdate. I've also run into file size limits, but that's not really a function of the command line interface to the tool.

[sho_hn]

nope, it's using `find`.

[agys]

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

[Barrin92]

it can work but it's far from science fiction. LLMs tend to produce extremely subpar if not buggy ffmpeg code. They'll routinely do things like put the file parameter before the start time which needlessly decodes the entire video, produce wrong bitrates, re-encode audio needlessly, and so on.

If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.

[pmarreck]

what... wait... In what universe do people write argument processing that doesn't process the content of all the arguments upfront AND THEN do things in the right order??

[amenhotep]

ffmpeg -i in -ss start -to end out is wrong and bad? You can -ss before -i? TIL!

[xandrius]

Had to do exactly that with a bunch of screenshots I took but happened to include a bunch of unnecessary parts of the screen.

A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.

The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.

[euroderf]

Are you accusing Blade Runner of infringing FFmpeg IP ?

[jjcm]

LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. There are tons of tools out there that can help you run it with natural language. Here's my personal script: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg

[pmarreck]

i wrote a command “please” that allows me to say “please use ffmpeg to do whatever” and it generates the command with confirmation