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Comment by rado | Hacker News Reader

FFmpeg has almost never worked for me on simple conversion jobs, now adding such advanced features.

I am curious if you would like to share your experiences. I use FFmpeg (almost) daily and I would go as far as saying it is one of the most reliable pieces of software I 've ever used.

It all depends on what kind of data you're feeding it. I'd been using ffmpeg for years without ever seeing it segfault, until I started processing videos at an unusually small resolution and suddenly it crashes a lot. (But nondeterminstically, so I can put the command in a loop and it'll eventually finish successfully.) Well, I submitted a core dump via Ubuntu's Apport and hopefully someone will have a look at it.

For quicker triage, open a ticket at trac.ffmpeg.org.

What are you using it for? I have the opposite experience - where almost anything or everything else fails, ffmpeg is able to handle it.

Really? For simple conversions?

I've been running basically this, which is a simple conversion to ogv, mp4, and VP9 webm, with a tiny bit of audio cleaning:

    ffmpeg -y -nostdin -i $f -threads 8 -codec:v libtheora -qscale:v 4 -codec:a libvorbis -af afftdn -qscale:a 0 $f.ogv -codec:v libvpx-vp9 -qscale:v 4 -codec:a libvorbis -af afftdn -qscale:a 0 $f.webm -codec:v mpeg4 -codec:a aac -af afftdn -qscale:a 0 -qscale:v 4 $f.mp4

Across a huge dataset from a huge number of backgrounds, usually incredibly crap, for about 18 months, now. Without downtime. And with decent quality output, or at least pretty close to equal the input (did I mention it is often incredibly bad? Including near-broken files, and even some files with less than 20,000 pixels, total).

I'm not sure exactly what "never worked" means without more detail, but I'd say it's a workhorse.

It's actually super powerful and useful for simple one-off encodes or complex batch processes. I have worked for clients who required an end-to-end transcoding pipeline (ABR) with packaging, subtitles, multiple-audio, etc. and it took a 100 line shell script to get everything done.

It's true that if you simply use it on it's simple form such as "ffmpeg -i in.mp4 out.mov" the default bitrate will favour creating small files that will have artefacts, as soon as you set the right option you get very nice results.

Can you share any typical settings you recommend? I’m experiencing small amounts of artifacts, would love to know of someone’s “safe default”. Thanks!

  -c copy

It's difficult because it depends on the player you will use and the destination codec.

I keep a document with arguments I use for each of my use case.

I think a Magit-like interface for ffmpeg would make ffmpeg much easier to use

I usually steer new-comers to Handbrake. That's a great starting point.

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