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by jack_pp 86 days ago
Maybe it helps to view ffmpeg as a DSL and the ugliness is caused by the CLI constraints / conventions.

For what it's worth, LLMs are a great tool for both composing and understanding ffmpeg commands.

And if you want something more verbose / easier to read you can use something like https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python (with LLMs) as well
1 comments
argsnd 86 days ago
It looks like that project is dead, some googling turned up this one which seems active and popular

https://github.com/pyav-org/pyav

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jack_pp 86 days ago
They are not comparable, ffmpeg-python just abstracts away the CLI, pyav is a low level binding of the ffmpeg libs.

It may seem "dead" but ultimately it just helps you build CLI commands in a more sane way, the CLI interface to ffmpeg has been consistent for a long time. Only thing that may change is individual filters which you can just give raw to ffmpeg-python.

I remember when I was heavily using it last year I found a fork that seemingly had more sane typing or something but since LLMs last year didn't know about the newer lib but could write decent ffmpeg-python code I stuck with it and it did the job.

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