Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

That's beautiful! I see a .claude folder in your code, I am curious if you've "vibecoded" the whole project or just had claude there for some tasks! not that it matters or takes away from your work but just pure curiosity as someone who enjoys betting on the LLM output XD

When converting video to gif, I always use palettegen, e.g.

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "fps=15,scale=640:-2:flags=lanczos,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=reserve_transparent=off[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=sierra2_4a" -loop 0 output.gif

[1] https://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html

The one good usecase I've found for AI chatbots, is writing ffmpeg commands. You can just keep chatting with it until you have the command you need. Some of them I save as an executable .command, or in my .txt note.

Can't access the githup repo https://github.com/josharsh/ezff

That's the problem ideally solved by typed data, i.e., some UI where instead of trying to memorize whether it's thumb/s/nails you can read the closed list of alternatives, read contextual help and pick one

Thanks, will definitely check this out

Has anyone else been avoiding typing FFmpeg commands by using file:// URLs with yt-dlp

I have a little script that I use on the CLI to do this kind of stuff (calls an LLM to figure out how to do CLI stuff) but you can just as easily now use any of the coding agents.

Very cool idea since ffmpeg is one of those tools that has a few common tasks but most users would need to look up the syntax every time to implement them (or make an alias). In line with the ease of use motivation, you might consider supporting tab completion.

GitHub repo link returns 404.

interesting approach, i solved similar problem by creating visual tool to generate ffmpeg commands but its not the same(it cant do conversion etc.)

I like that you took no AI approach, i am looking for something like this i.e. understanding intent and generating command without using AI but so far regex based approaches have proved to be inadequate. I also tried indexing keywords and creating index of keywords with similar meaning that improved the situation a bit but without something heavy like bert its always a subpar experience.

Somehow it seems ffmpeg has become the "Can it run crysis" of UX design

Sometimes an idea comes along thats so obvious it makes me angry. I have been struggling with ffmpeg commands for over well a decade. All the time I wasted googling and creating scripts so I wouldn't have to regoogle and this could have existed literally from day one

I like the idea, but a CLI utility dependent on Node.js is not a good thing frankly.

I was surprised that macOS (QuickTime/Preview, iMovie) can't read .mp4 files. Not sure if it was due to H.265 or the audio codec. I tried using ffmpeg to convert to .mov but that also failed to open, since I guess MOV is just another container format.

Is there an easier way?

Uhm... Millibit, Millibyte, Megabit, Megabyte?

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