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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I'm very much a command line guy but ffmpeg still stumps me. Might be nice if it could save the various ffmpeg arg soups as some kind of friendly name, e.g. "combine jpegs into a timelapse" or "convert video to HTML5-friendly format" and then just drop-down and fill in the timelapse parameters or whatever.

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If you want to see an example of that exact thing, I've got a small suite of wrapped FFMPEG tools doing exactly that via Gooey. Having things like screen recording, gif creation, trimming/truncating in a GUI just makes them way more convenient for my frail brain compared to FFMPEG's tough APIs.

[0]https://github.com/chriskiehl/GooeyVideo

FFmpeg was the first example I thought of too, but I don't think that there is a screen large enough to display all it's options and flags.

I just have a folder with a bunch of scripts with various descriptive names which launch ffmpeg with different painstakingly composed argument chains. I could join them into a mega-script which would prompt me upon execution but I don't see the point in an additional indirection.

Sometimes one script is just not enough/not convenient enough, and I write simple helper wrappers such as:

- https://indiscipline.github.io/post/movie-thumbnailer-announ...

- https://indiscipline.github.io/post/ffmpeg-loudnorm-helper-a...

Plenty of options, one I haven’t seen mentioned is Shutter Encoder. I don’t think it covers all of ffmpeg functionality, it focuses on format conversions useful for video professionals and does a fine job of it.

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

Handbrake is great for transcoding! Not sure if it can do the more esoteric tasks.

I don't use it myself, but maybe have a look at Staxrip? It's not quite that user friendly, but a lot more than remembering the commands for making a video from individual images.

I also like to use the command line, but I hate that flags are inconsistent, case sensitive (with unrelated meaning) and not good discoverable

I personally have no desire to use it outside of Windows, but Powershell fixes all there things if you're so inclined:

> flags are inconsistent

At least among the core command set, there is a set of "core flags" like -ErrorAction or -Verbose that are consistent. Though I don't know how often you'll find them in third-party commands.

> case sensitive

There's a preferred case that you'll get if you tab complete, but -Verbose is -VERBOSE is -VERBOSE.

> not good discoverable

Tab completion works for flags everywhere and each of them should be included in Get-Help regardless of if the author documents them.

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