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Comment by merksoftworks | Hacker News Reader

ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format. I've had the displeasure of using the C api a few times, while it's straight forward in many respects, it makes invalid states extremely easy to represent. I would love a realtime AV1 encoding framework that "just works".

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> ffmpeg has always felt like a gui application crammed into tui format.

It’s one of the only tools where I reach for a GUI equivalent (Handbrake) by default, unless I’m doing batch processing. There are a few pure ffmpeg GUIs out there as well. There’s just something about working with video that CLI doesn’t work right with my brain for.

I can vouch for GStreamer as an API. I was using the Rust bindings so not super familiar with the C API but it looks good. GObject makes some things verbose but once you understand it you can interact with every object in the API consistently. There is a ton of necessary complexity (video is hard) but it’s really well designed and pretty well implemented and documented.

If you have a pretty normal use case the Bins (decodebin, transcodebin, playbin) make that pretty easy. If you have a more complex use case the flexibility of the design makes it possible.

ffmpeg API is somewhat clunky but it works fine. I dread working with gstreamer, sea of leaky abstractions, inexplicable workarounds and mysterious bugs.

I like this insight, but TUI is something graphical while ffmpeg is just CLI.

It would be cool to see if a TUI tool existed. Something like https://github.com/Twinklebear/fbed but more feature complete.

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