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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

It'd be nice, though, to have a proper API (in the traditional sense, not SaaS) instead of having to figure out these command lines in what's practically its own programming language....

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FFMpeg does have an API. It ships a few libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, and others) which expose a C api that is used in the ffmpeg command line tool.

They publish doxygen generated documentation for the APIs, available here: https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/trunk/

Don't know how I overlooked that, thanks. Maybe because the one Python wrapper I know about is generating command lines and making subprocess calls.

They're relatively low level APIs. Great if you're a C developer, but for most things you'd do in python just calling the command line probably does make more sense.

As someone that used these APIs in C, they were not very well-documented nor intuitive, and oftentimes segfaulted when you messed up, instead of returning errors—I suppose the validation checks sacrifice performance for correctness, which is undesirable. Either way, dealing with this is not fun. Such is the life of a C developer, I suppose....

It could even make sense in C. In some circumstances, I wouldn’t feel bad for cutting that corner.

Yes, that's what I did some time ago. I already want concurrency and isolation, so why not let the OS do that. Also I don't need to manage resources, when ffmpeg already does that.

For future reference, if you want proper python bindings for ffmpeg* you should use pyav.

* To be more precise, these are bindings for the libav* libraries that underlie ffmpeg

If you are processing user data, the subprocess approach makes it easier to handle bogus or corrupt data. If something is off, you can just kill the subprocess. If something is wrong with the linked C api, it can be harder to handle predictably.

Also because you can apply stricter sandboxing/jail/containerization to the process.

I get why the CLI is so complicated, but I will say AI has been great at figuring out what I need to run given an English language input. It's been one of the highest value uses of AI for me.

Pretty much the reason I created https://github.com/alfg/ffmpeg-commander, prior to AI uses.

hell yeah, same here. i made a little python GUI app to edit videos

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