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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
I tried it to check before making the comment. In Ubuntu 25.04 it does not automatically enable compression based on the filename. The automatic detection when extracting is based on file contents, not name.
-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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
And why is -v the short option for --invert-match in grep, when that's usually --verbose or --version in lots of other places. These idiosyncrasies are hardly unique to tar.
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):
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.