FFmpeg 8.0

Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:

    Video2X-x86_64.AppImage -i "$f" \
     -c libvpx-vp9 -e crf=34 -o "${f/480p/480p_upscale2x}" \
     -p realcugan -s 2 --noise-level 1

I haven't even had a cursory look at decoders state of the art for 10+ years. But my intuition would say that decoding for display could profit a lot from GPU acceleration for later parts of the process when there is already pixel data of some sort involved. Then I imagine thet the initial decompression steps could stay on the CPU and the decompressed, but still (partially) encoded data is streamed to the GPU for the final transformation steps and application to whatever I-frames and other base images there are. Steps like applying motion vectors, iDCT... look embarrassingly parallel at a pixel level to me.

When the resulting frame is already in a GPU texture then, displaying it has fairly low overhead.

My question is: how wrong am I?

> Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders.

This is great news. I remember being laughed at when I initially asked whether the Vulkan enc/dec were generic because at the time it was all just standardising interfaces for the in-silicon acceleration.

Having these sorts of improvements available for legacy hardware is brilliant, and hopefully a first route that we can use to introduce new codecs and improve everyone's QOL.

Exciting! I am consistently blown away by the talent of the ffmpeg maintainers. This is fairly hard stuff in my opinion and they do it for free.

> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. There are tons of tools out there that can help you run it with natural language. Here's my personal script: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg

Is this satire, serious, or both. :)

Handbrake fits the bill, I think!

It's a great tool. Little long in the tooth these days, but gets the job done.

For Mac users, ffWorks [1] is an amazing frontend for FFmpeg that surfaces most of the features but with a decent GUI. It’s batchable and you can setup presets too. It’s one of my favorite apps and the developer is very responsive.

Handbrake and Losslssscut are great too. But in addition to donating to FFmpeg, I pay for ffWorks because it really does offer a lot of value to me. I don’t think there is anything close to its polish on other platforms, unfortunately.

[1]: https://www.ffworks.net/index.html

I have found the best front-end to be ChatGPT. It is very good at figuring out the commands needed to accomplish something in FFmpeg, from my natural description of what I want to do.

check out https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

I haven't used a GUI I like, but LLMs like ChatGPT have been so good for solving this for me. I tell it exactly what I need it to do and it produces the ffmpeg command to do it.

There is handbrake, vidcoder and all sorts of frontend.

You can use mkvtoolnix for that and it has a GUI

Shotcut is an open source Video production toolkit that is basically just a really nice interface for generating ffmpeg commands.

https://www.shotcut.org/

FFMpeg is probably not as up high since video processing only needs to be done on the servers that receive media. I doubt most phones are running FFMpeg on video.

You can pull the nix logs from here: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/main/metrics/fastly/READ...

Could be an interesting data source to explore that opinion.

You can check, at least for Arch Linux: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages

It's up there in the hall of fame, that's for sure!

libcurl?

libc :D

For those out of the loop, can you please explain your comment?

And some influencers ;)

I remember saving my incantation to download and convert a youtube playlist (in the form of a txt file with a list of URLs) and this being the only way to back up Chrome music bookmark folders.

Then it stopped working until I updated youtube-dl and then that stopped working once I lost the incantation :<

Yeah, basically anytime a video or audio is being recorded, played, or streamed its from ffmpeg. It runs on a couple planets [0], and on most devices (maybe?)

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

Pretty much.

It also was originally authored by the same person who did lzexe, tcc, qemu, and the current leader for the large text compression benchmark.

Oh, and for most of the 2010's there was a fork due to interpersonal issues on the team.

Yeah I think pretty much everything that involves video on Linux or FreeBSD in 2025 involves FFmpeg or Gstreamer, usually the former.

It’s exceedingly good software though, and to be fair I think it’s gotten a fair bit of sponsorship and corporate support.

It's the big flat one at the bottom.

Yes, this is a pretty fundamental building block; just not so rickety.