Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.

It's funny because GPU stuff like what this article is about is where the LLMs totally fall apart. I can make any LLM produce volumes hallucinations at the drop of a hat by asking it how to construct ffmpeg commands that use hardware acceleration.

Another option is to use a non-cli LLM and ask it to produce a script (bash/ps1) that uses ffmpeg to do X, Y, and Z to your video files. If using a chat LLM it will often provide suggestions or ask questions to improve your processing as well. I do this often and the results are quite good.

Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.

I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out

the canonical (if that's the right word for a 2-year-old technique) solution is to paste the whole manual into the context before asking questions