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Comment by zackoverflow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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What's your opinion on libraries like python-ffmpeg that allow you to build filter graphs programmatically with tree-like data structures?

I haven't played around much with ffmpeg-python, I used to use fluent-ffmpeg for a bit. They're an improvement over writing raw command strings, but they lack static analysis features to verify the correctness of your command at compile time. There's only so much you can do with the constraints of general programming languages.

I'm going to add the ability to export graphs as ffmpeg-python/fluent-ffmpeg code, and to import a graph from ffmpeg-python/fluent-ffmpeg code as well.

In something like Haskell or OCaml, it would be possible to verify the tree/graph at compile the time. That's why functional languages with powerful (or even dependent) type systems are so popular!

The other day I was thinking that precisely this is needed!

Question:

Why are you offering lifetime access for $39? Makes no sense. Anyone company that needs this can afford $100/month. Any individual who needs it can afford $30 for 3 months access.

Ideas:

It would be good if I could upload my ffmpeg binary and the IDE queries it to work out what libraries and options are compiled in.

Or maybe you could provide a command that I could enter that dumps this information, which I then put into your IDE.

It would be great if I could put my existing ffmpeg command lines into this and have them represented as a graph.

Honestly the pricing was selected kind of on a whim, I actually didn't think anyone would use the project. Will probably update the pricing.

I'm not sure how much information could be extracted from the binary, will need to do some more research. Maybe we could read the strings in the static part of the binary and extract some information.

`ffmpeg -i` prints out the configuration FFmpeg was built with, this mostly will let us know which encoder/decoders/container formats you can use. Will add a feature to parse and interpret that output.

I added an ffmpeg command string parser that converts the command stirng into graph nodes, but I temporarily disabled it to fix an infinite loop bug in my parsing code.

To follow up on this, we did update the pricing now https://ffmpeg.guide/pricing which should be effective from Nov 1st. Gonna try to move some more lifetime deals at a slightly higher price before then

Glad you did. This would’ve been super helpful when I was building glancy[0] and I would’ve gladly paid for a few months of access at a time.

[0] https://glancy.io

As a hobbyist who doesn't _need_ this, the 6-node free plan feels very reasonable for tinkering around and sanity-checking something.

As someone with a project at work that involves setting up an ffmpeg project in the future, I'm now expecting to talk to my boss about expensing this and I think it's at the perfect price point where it won't take too much effort to get them to budge.

This is so useful! Would you consider adding some way of linking a filter to the ffmpeg documentation/reference for it? Or maybe some way of embedding it on a sidebar when a node is selected?

Looks great. Should be a big help. Can I check out the code?

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