I've enjoyed using ffmpeg 1000% more since I was able to stop doing manually the tedious task of Googling for Stack Overflow answers and cobbling them into a command and got Chat GPT to write me commands instead.
uv tool install llm
llm install llm-cmd
llm cmd use ffmpeg to extract audio from myfile.mov and save that as mp3
(honestly, the work you share is very inspiring)
So much like code assistance, they still need a fair amount of baby sitting. A good boost for experienced operators but might suck for beginners.
Usually the color was wrong and I don’t care enough to learn about colorspaces to figure out how to fix it and it’s utterly insane how difficult it is even with LLMs.
Just reencode it as is but a little more lossy. Is that so hard?
Perhaps at some point there will be a triage LLM to slurp up the problem and then decide which secondary LLM is most optimal for that query, and some tertiary LLMs that execute and evaluate it in a virtual machine, etc.
Maybe someday
Did any of the commands look like the ones in the left window:
https://beta.gitsense.com/?chats=12850fe4-ffb1-4618-9215-c13...
The left window contains a summary of all the LLMs asked, including all commands. The right window contains the individual LLM responses.
I asked about gotchas with missing libraries as well, and Sonnet 3.5 said there were. Were these the same libraries that were missing for you?
Where I find GPT to perform better than Sonnet is with text processing. GPT seems to better understand what I want when it comes to processing documents.
I'm convinced that no LLM provider has created or will create a moat, and that we will always need to shop around for an answer.
4o replaced 4 back in April 2024. 01/01mini replaced 4o in Fall 2024.
stop using 4. use 01mini always. its cheaper, faster, and better.
o1/o1mini will be replaced by o3/o3mini in a couple months.
The months old sonnet feels a generation ahead of any OAI product I've used, I'll believe the hype on o3 when I see it, remember the sora and voice roll out?
I had this bizarre bug in rust networking code where packets were getting dropped.
i dumped all 20k lines into o1pro. it thought for about ten minutes and came back telling me that my packets had a chance of being merged if set in quick succession and i needed to send the length before each message and scan packets in a loop for subdivisions on the client. this bug hadnt happened before, only when running locally on a newer faster machine, and was frequent but hard to replicate.
it was correct, and provided detailed pseudo code to solve it.
the second case involved some front end code where during an auth flow ios would force refresh on returning to the browser causing authentication state to be lost. o1pro thought for about 5 minutes before telling me ios has a heuristic with which it decides to close an app on context switch based on available ram, etc, and that i needed to conditionally check for ios and store partial state in local store on leave assuming the app could be deloaded without my control.
it was correct. with some more back and forth we fixed the bug.
these are not the kinds of problems that claude and gpt<4 have been able to help with at all.
I also used voice, and video voice extensively for translation tasks in korea, japan, and taiwan, and for controlling japanese interfaces and forms for tax documents and software.
These are very good tools.
It's another tool and one that might actually improve with time. I don't see GNU's man pages getting any better spontaneously.
Whoa, what if they started to use AI to auto-generate man pages...
That’s the time to start my career in woodworking.
It works really well.
It is not simply a "generate man page" without context.
Then they'd be wrong about 20% of the time, and still no one would read them. ;-)
(NB: I'm of the age that I do read them, but I think I'm in the minority.)
If we could imagine wiring a pony to control a car, its brain, while good at navigation, would likely be inadequate at the speed that a car attains.
Or he can just ditch the car and walk. Sure, it's slower and requires more effort, but he knows exactly how to do that and where it will take him.
And in some situations ffmpeg has some warts you have to go around. Like they introduced recently a moronic change of behaviour where the first sub tracks becomes forced/default irrespective of the original forced/default flag of the source. You need to add "-default_mode infer_no_subs" to counter that.
I no longer check with these AI tools after a number of attempts. Unrelated, a friend thought there was a NFL football game last Saturday at noon. Checking with Google's Gemini, it said "no", but there was one between two teams whose season had ended two weeks before at 1:00 Eastern Time and 2:00 Central. (The times are backwards.)
Ask them about the fire in LA in 2025 January.
I don't think the notion of "current" has been explained to them. Thay just define it out of context.
I appreciate the UI choice here. I have yet to do anything with AI (consciously and deliberately, anyway) but this sort of thing is exactly what I imagine as a proper use case.
As a helper and not a replacement, this sounds grand. Like the most epic autocomplete. Because I hate how much time I waste trying to figure out the command line incantation when I already know precisely what I want to do. It’s the weakest part of the command line experience.
Learning a tool is useful, even invaluable, but if you don't have the persistence to use it, it's useless.
And many tools are just partially useful under some conditions. So creativity in using them is also useful.
So it's not about the tools, its about not giving up and trying different things, which makes all tools more effective, and problem-solving more likely.
It's not the only approach, and definitely as someone once said, premature optimization is the root of all evil, and maybe you are optimizing at exactly the right time.
Who can tell?
ffmpeg commands though? It's really not a practical skill outside of using ffmpeg. There's nothing really rewarding to me about memorizing awkwardly designed CLI incantations. It's all arbitrary.
I'm talking about
1. you have a problem, you try something and it doesn't work. 2. you find an LLM and it "gives" you the answer with one or two tries 3. problem solved! what have you learned? How to have answers given to you when you ask.
or 2. you look for an answer in a dizzying haze of man pages, quacks, and website Q&As. 3. you try and try again and eventually problem solved. you have learned not only how to solve a particular problem but your overall ability to solve similar problems has done up. You've learned how to fish, not just ask an LLM for a fish.
and yet, i too know that it is perhaps not quite as good for me as finding the fish on my own lake
at least i can keep these fish in my own warm pond, and go back to them whenever i like
after decades of ice fishing, i think the LLM fish are quite good... and even when they are no good, that fishing experience makes it so easy to go back to the LLM and get the exact right fish for my pond
it will continue to be helpful for everyone in the future if we keep publishing the contents of our ponds, whether it's a web site like this, or in a repository
I am sure that will never cause any problems.
Many such cases.
as in
bash> please "use ffmpeg to extract audio from myfile.mov and save it as mp3"
Here is the whole thing, with its two dependent functions, so that people stop writing their own versions of this lol. All it needs is an OPENAI_API_KEY, feel free to modify for other LLMs
EDIT: Moved to a gist: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/9ce17f7996347dd532f3e20a2a3...
Suggestions welcome- for example I want to add a feature that either just copies it (for further modification) or prepopulates the command line with it somehow (possibly for further modification, or even for skipping the approval step)
does anyone know of any?
What are your current issues or what limitations have you ran into?
"The Insanity Of Linux's Regular Expressions " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys7yUyyQA-Y
All in all, my life would be miserable if I would not have regexp available in grep/sed/editor/ide/java/python, their usefulness trump any such inconveniences.
And speaking of ffmpeg, or tooling in general, I tend to make notes. After a while you end up with a pretty decent curated reference.
In one tool you’ll use + to match one or more times, and \+ to mean literal plus sign.
In another tool you’ll use \+ to match one or more time, and + to mean literal plus sign.
In one tool you’ll use ( and ) to create a match group, and \( and \) to mean literal open and close parentheses.
In another tool you’ll use \( and \) to create a match group, and ( and ) to mean literal open and close parentheses.
This is basically the only problem I have when writing regexes, for the kinds of regexes I write.
Also, one thing that’s not a problem per se but something that leads me to write my regexes with more characters than strictly necessary is that I rarely use shorthand for groups of characters. For example the tool might have a shorthand for digit but I always write [0-9] when I need to match a digit. Also probably because the shorthand might or might not be different for different tools.
Regexes are also known to be “write once read never”, in that writing a regex is relatively easy, but revisiting a semi-complicated regex you or someone else wrote in the past takes a little bit of extra effort to figure out what it’s matching and what edits one should make to it. In this case, tools like https://regex101.com/ or https://www.debuggex.com/ help a lot.
They're both tools where if they're part of your daily workflow you'll get immense value out of learning them thoroughly. If instead you need a regex once or twice a week, the benefit is not greater than the cost of learning to do it myself. I have a hundred other equally complicated things to learn and remember, half the job of the computer is to know things I can't put in my brain. If it can do the regex for me, I suddenly get 70% of the value at no cost.
Regex is not a tool I need often enough to justify the hours and brain space. But it is still an indespensible tool. So when I need a regex, I either ask a human wizard I know, or now I ask my computer directly.
My kid uses wifi, google classroom tools, youtube, games,... I can tell him if only you knew command.com, ipconfig, doom.wad formats, lateg,... you could be so much more proficient. I already know this will never happen, just like I never learned x86 assembly.
The same goes for tools like LLMs, once you are used to them, your knowledge shifts.
If you have ffmpeg installed and an OpenAI env api key set, it should work out of the box.
Demo: https://image.non.io/1c7a92ef-0917-49ef-9460-6298c7a9116c.we...
i started with avisynth, and it took time for my brain to switch to ffmpeg. i don't know how i could function without ffmpeg at this point
The sense of elation I get when I wonder aloud to my digital friend and they generate what I thought was too much to expect. Well worth the subscription.
ffmpeg <Input file(s)> <Codec(s)> <MAPping of streams> <Video Filters> output_file
ffmpeg -i file1.mp4 -i file2.mkv
- codec: -c:x where x is the type of codec (v: video, a: audio or s:subtitles), followed by its name, like so:
-c:v libx265
- mapping of streams: -map <input_file>:<stream_type>:<order>, like so:
-map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:1 -map 1:a:0 -map 1:s:4
The position of the stream in the output file is determined by the position of the map command in the command line, so for example in the command above we are inverting the position of the audio streams (taken from 'file2.mkv'), as audio stream 1 will be in first position in the output file, and audio stream 0 (the first in the second input file) will be in second position in the output file.
This map thing is for me the most counter-intuitive because it's unusual for a CLI to be order-dependent. But, well, it is.
- video filters: -vf
Video filters can be extremely complex and I don't pretend to know how to use them by heart. But one simple video filter that I use often is 'scale', for resizing a video:
-vf scale=<width>:<height>
-vf scale=320:-1
And that's about it! ffmpeg options are immense, but this gets me through 90% of my video encoding needs, without looking at a manual or ask an LLM. (The only other options I use often are -ss and -t for start time and duration, to time-crop a video.)
Likely because the aspect ratio will no longer be the same. There will either be lost information (cropping), compression/stretching, or black bars, none of which should be default behaviour. Hence, the warning.
It's not about integer, but some of the sizes need to be even. You can use `-vf scale=320:-2` to ensure that.
But thanks for '-2', didn't know about that! It's the exact default option I needed! Will be using that always from now on.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71092347/ffmeg-option-sc...
ffmpeg -i <movie-with-many-tracks.mkv> -map 0:0 -map 0:5 -map 0:12 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -scodec copy "output-movie.mkv"
I had a problem I'd been thinking about for some time and I thought "Ill have some LLM give me an answer" and it did - it was wrong and didn't work but it got me to thinking about the problem in a slightly different way and my quacks after that got me an exact solution to this problem.
So I'm willing to give the AI more than partial credit.
If the CLI is installed, you can do: gencmd -c ffmpeg extract first 1 minute of video
Or you can just search for the same in the browser page.
But really what ffmpeg is missing is an expressive language to describe its operation. Something well-structured, like what jq does for JSON.