[HN Gopher] Show HN: FFmpeg Command Visualizer and Editor
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       Show HN: FFmpeg Command Visualizer and Editor
        
       Author : zackoverflow
       Score  : 150 points
       Date   : 2022-10-29 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ffmpeg.guide)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ffmpeg.guide)
        
       | manca wrote:
       | This is brilliant. A long time ago when I worked on Windows video
       | apps, I used to use Graph Studio[1] to visualize the video graph
       | comprised of countless DirectShow filters. It occurred to me
       | multiple times that such a tool would be super useful for ffmpeg
       | as well.
       | 
       | It really helps visualize your filter graphs, especially when
       | building complex video processing pipelines. Too bad this is not
       | open source... I'd be more than happy to contribute.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/cplussharp/graph-studio-next
        
       | HAL9OOO wrote:
       | This is a godsend considering I'm just starting an FFMPEG project
       | right now. Do you have any other resources you recommend to fully
       | grasp FFMPEG and even what it's capable of? This website is
       | awesome btw!
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | practice practice practice. if you're using ffmpeg as a one of
         | project, then you'll never grok it. if you're using ffmpeg as a
         | daily tool doing many things, you'll almost start to think you
         | grok it, but then still learn something new about it. whatever
         | your current need of ffmpeg is right now, it is probably such a
         | small subset of what it can do that you'll forever be amazed at
         | what other people are doing with it.
         | 
         | if you're stuck on something and can't find an answer, keep
         | trying to rephrase your question. i'd put money down that it is
         | highly unlikely you are the first person attempting whatever
         | you are doing, and it is very likely someone else has had
         | issues like you.
         | 
         | sometimes, searching for the exact error message isn't as
         | useful as one would hope, but with enough time you'll start to
         | recognize how/why those errors are what ffmpeg is struggling
         | with but it is actually something related that you need to
         | address.
        
       | kretaceous wrote:
       | I think this is the best take among any ffmpeg GUIs I've seen.
       | Good job! Gonna take this for a spin.
        
         | xuhu wrote:
         | I really wish someone makes an ffmpeg GUI that gives you a
         | visual editing timeline but also allows you to use
         | filtergraphs.
        
           | jcelerier wrote:
           | i've been thinking on having an ffmpeg filter object in
           | https://ossia.io for quite some time, which would give the
           | timeline aspect for free (and wouldn't be too hard to
           | integrate as ffmpeg is already used for decoding A/V and we
           | have a very very simple plug-in API which supports audio,
           | video and GPU processing : https://celtera.github.io/avendish
           | ). Just not a priority... but if someone is interested in
           | contributing it I can definitely mentor.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | That's awesome!
       | 
       | Thanks so much!
       | 
       | People make entire careers off tuning ffmpeg.
        
       | cyberphobe wrote:
       | Why is it asking me to sign into my Google account?
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | Surely you've heard of OAuth.
         | 
         | But if that's rhetorical/curt, then the answer can also be
         | found on the home page of the site: it's a service with a paid
         | component and the login is to associate the purchase with your
         | account. Very common across the web.
        
           | onion2k wrote:
           | That explains signing in to pay for the service or to access
           | the paid tier options, but why do you need to sign in before
           | that?
        
             | thrdbndndn wrote:
             | So they can track their users? The free tier users are
             | still users.
        
       | rychco wrote:
       | Seems like a really great idea, and the few times I used ffmpeg I
       | could have really benefited from this. That being said, I almost
       | exclusively prefer email signup over Google sign-in.
        
         | poisonborz wrote:
         | I can understand not wanting to create an email-password login,
         | but imagine for a moment losing your Google account for any
         | reason, and losing all your accounts associated with it.
        
         | l0b0 wrote:
         | I don't want any kind of sign-in for stuff like this. Just send
         | me straight to the interface.
        
       | cloudking wrote:
       | Nice idea! Does this handle transcoding parameters for MPEG-DASH?
        
       | Xenoamorphous wrote:
       | ffmpeg is such a great tool, it's complex but because video stuff
       | is complex. Shoutout to llogan and gyan in StackOverflow, I don't
       | think I could've done a few things without their help.
        
       | zackoverflow wrote:
       | Hey OP here, I spend a significant amount of time generating
       | complex FFmpeg filtergraphs for my project. They can get really
       | long and cumbersome, so I made this tool that lets you visualize
       | and edit them, and generates the FFmpeg command string for you.
       | 
       | It sort of became an IDE/LSP for FFmpeg filters. My biggest
       | problems were having to constantly to flip to FFmpeg
       | documentation and errors in my filters. So I added autocomplete
       | and embedded the FFmpeg docs. It also verifies the correctness of
       | filters/arguments, and does an analysis on the graph to verify
       | connections/etc.
        
         | heavyset_go wrote:
         | What's your opinion on libraries like python-ffmpeg that allow
         | you to build filter graphs programmatically with tree-like data
         | structures?
        
         | irthomasthomas wrote:
         | Looks great. Should be a big help. Can I check out the code?
        
       | crazygringo wrote:
       | First of all, I love this. ffmpeg is the closest to magic, with
       | the arguments the closest to Harry Potter-type spells, I've ever
       | seen.
       | 
       | Second... I swear it makes me want something like this for shell
       | commands in general. The amount of time I've wasted trying to fix
       | nightmare quoting and spacing issues when passing arguments
       | (containing spaces) that get to a command that will run ssh to
       | run a command remotely that needs those original arguments...
       | 
       | I swear if there were a visual command-line builder that
       | guaranteed quotes and spaces and variables were always printed
       | and escaped correctly, _together_ with a visual reminder of what
       | the -akxlIEJC flags all mean... in other words, I want this but
       | for way more than just ffmpeg! :)
        
         | olex wrote:
         | Something like this for ImageMagick would be awesome. Its CLI
         | syntax is not quite as arcane as FFmpeg, but the sheer breadth
         | of available options and the power of possible combinations is
         | similarly insane.
        
         | RupertEisenhart wrote:
         | Hard agree until--
         | 
         | Copilot changed all this for me. Even using ffmpeg, now I just
         | open a .sh and describe the functions that I want in comments
         | and fiddle with what copilot gives me.
         | 
         | Copilot is at it's best writing dumb little shell scripts. Just
         | today I was asking it to help me extract gps coords from a json
         | with jq. A dream.
        
           | crazygringo wrote:
           | I think they're different ideas though, although I never
           | thought about Copilot for that.
           | 
           | But Copilot is kind of exactly where I might assume that the
           | given solution will work for arguments that don't contain
           | spaces or quotes -- but where the bugs will show up in
           | Copilot's code precisely in space-and-quote situations,
           | because they're what programmers are so frequently getting
           | wrong anyways.
           | 
           | In other words, I'm looking for a visual tool that produces
           | shell commands guaranteed to be correct, not that work until
           | you try passing a filename that includes a space.
        
       | leros wrote:
       | This is really cool. Ffmpeg is really suited for this type of
       | visual programming flow.
       | 
       | Is this code open source? I could use something like this in one
       | of my own projects.
        
         | cryogenicplanet wrote:
         | Nope this is not open source, but the flow interface is made
         | with react-flow which is
         | 
         | https://reactflow.dev/
        
       | throwoutway wrote:
       | This looks great. What was the graphing made of? I think I
       | recognize the library but can't remember the name
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-29 23:00 UTC)