This has to be at least the fifth LLMpeg I've seen posted to hacker news in the past few months.
This whole repo is a single 300 LoC Python file over half of which is the system prompt and comments. It's not even a fine-tuned model or something, it's literally just a wrapper around llama-cpp with a very basic prompt tacked on.
I'm sure it's potentially useful and maybe even works, but I'm really sick of seeing these extremely low-effort projects posted and upvoted over and over.
N_Lens · 2h ago
At this rate one could probably automate the low effort project -> HN post pipeline
jagged-chisel · 1h ago
Hmm … {thinking face emoji}
{money-mouth face emoji}
wolletd · 1h ago
Using yet another LLM to generate the project code!
Sesse__ · 38m ago
At some point, one would imagine just making a less confusing FFmpeg CLI would be a better use of everyone's time. (I've sort-of understood it now, but the learning curve is pretty steep.)
larodi · 3h ago
I bet it is very often that people upvote based on the title and perhaps comments, not the actual content or its utility. Besides, this karma business can really get one hooked as a sucker for the high grade…
do_not_redeem · 4h ago
It was vibe coded too, the doc comments and pokemon try-catch are dead giveaways. It's a slop wrapper around a slop generator to farm github stars. Welcome to the future.
xhrpost · 1h ago
> pokemon try-catch
I've seen LLM's do this in other languages as well but didn't realize there was a term for it. Wrapping entire function bodies in try/catch, at the very least please just wrap the caller so you don't have to indent the entire body for no reason. Not to mention a lot of commands inside can't even throw.
alfg · 4h ago
In case anyone is looking for a FFmpeg command builder that's not ai-generated:
You aren't doing anything related to ffmpeg at all. The only thing "related" to ffmpeg is the system prompt, which anyone could just paste into their chat window. Please stop posting low effort content like this.
The example itself shows a naive conversion, ending up transcoding to default h.264 params. This should have been -c:v copy for copying the input packets, as-is.
Why is it so hard to read the manual or even a cheatsheet? Many people use ffmpeg, it's not like there's a dearth of information out there...
crispyambulance · 35m ago
I am sure there exist people who live and breath media/codecs and they're reasonably fluent at getting ffmpeg to do what they want because of a tremendous amount of practice.
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
savolai · 5h ago
It would be helpful if this printed out the relevant sections from the ’man’ page of the command line options it suggests using, or told the user this option is undocumented in the man page.
This way user could directly review if it is suggesting something they want to go on with.
MrFurious · 3h ago
If you don't want learn ffmpeg syntax, is better use a visual gui how handbrake that a frontend for a fatty LLM.
ghostly_s · 5h ago
A rough estimate of the disk space required for the model + all other dependencies would be helpful in assessing this tool's utility. It looks like the recommended model alone is 2.4Gb?
adithyassekhar · 5h ago
Seems tiny for it to understand natural language, technical terms and their meanings (deinterlacing, pulldown..) and the ffmpeg commands related to it. Assuming it works.
camillomiller · 25m ago
Question: what makes creating a GUI for ffmpeg so difficult that none of sufficiently high quality seems to have gained relevance so far?
Also: I understand the privacy concerns, but basically any LLM that's large enough can act as a conversational UI to ffmpeg nowadays. Why would I want to add a specific one to do that?
yawnxyz · 2h ago
fwiw I've been dealing with a lot of ffmpeg lately and it's like the most obtuse API I've ever used, and I'm now using Warp for it, and it works amazingly every time
zipping1549 · 4h ago
LLMs are pretty good at ffmpeg already. No need to put ridiculous amount of examples.
klntsky · 3h ago
Actually no, they are not good at remembering cli args precisely. The docs must be in the context
ycombiredd · 2h ago
OP here.. I guess nobody got the joke. The last paragraph of the readme flat out says it was intended as amusing performance art.. Ludicrous is as ludicrous does.
x______________ · 20m ago
>Disclaimer This was largely made to amuse myself; consider it a piece of humorous performance art but it so borders on being actually useful, I went to the trouble to document all of this. YMMV. Use at your own risk. The author is not responsible for any damage or data loss that may occur from using this tool. Always review generated commands before executing them, especially when working with important files.
I'm on the fence on this one as the HN community thrives on novel interesting and sometimes humorous content, yet you got the ire of most.
Burying the line about it being a useful yet parody of a project at the very end helps no one understand as exactly for that point, this was sold as the latest and greatest, oh disclaimer, it really isn't.
Don't stop the work, but please remember to keep you intentions clear and your audience will understand.
I can't help but find it kinda humorous that if the 119 lines of the system prompt wasn't there, it would just be a generic script that takes your input, sends it to ollama and then system("...") the response after some light processing.
>You are an expert at writing commands for the `ffmpeg` multimedia framework.
>Respond ONLY with the `ffmpeg` command. Do not add any explanations, introductory text, or markdown formatting.
Fragility of it aside, and the fact that more is written to try and force it to do less, this is basically the gist of the whole thing.
dylan604 · 4h ago
The first example from your link
- User: "convert input.mov to a web-friendly mp4"
- Assistant: ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4
Isn't exactly a web-friendly mp4. the fast start option is not used. this means the MooV header is at the end of the file instead of the head. that means the entire file must be read/scanned to get to the metadata when the browser requests it which means a long delay depending on the size of the file.
- User: "create a 10-second clip from my_movie.mkv starting at the 1 minute 30 second mark"
- Assistant: ffmpeg -i my_movie.mkv -ss 00:01:30 -t 10 -c copy clip.mkv
this is another poor example, as it is again the slowest option by having the -ss after the -i. placing the -ss before the -i will result in the command being faster.
not really sure who is training this system on how to use ffmpeg, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that simple things like this are being missed. after this example, i just stopped looking
oefrha · 4h ago
> that means the entire file must be read/scanned to get to the metadata when the browser requests it which means a long delay depending on the size of the file.
Not really, unless your server doesn’t support range requests, browsers are smart enough to request the end of the file where a non-faststart moov atom typically lives. But yes, you should use faststart.
You’re right that this appears to be the work of someone who’s not very adept at ffmpeg. Which shouldn’t be surprising; as a power user, maybe even expert at ffmpeg, unless I need to write a complex filter graph, consulting an LLM will just slow me down—people like me have no need for this.
ivolimmen · 3h ago
> wtff "convert my_video.avi to mp4 with no sound"
English is not my mother tongue but I think the model should correct the user that it should be: "convert my_video.avi to mp4 without sound"
vasco · 5h ago
All cli programs (or shell itself) should soon have:
- argument syntax autocorrect
- natural language arguments instead of the actual ones should be accepted
- whenever there's an error executing, instead of just erroring out, the error should go through an LLM and output a proper explanation plus suggested fix
Doing command by command seems the wrong way about it though.
cryptonym · 3h ago
Having a fuzzy interpretation of configuration, and fuzzy input/output, on something designed for repeatable tasks? This doesn't sound like a great idea.
If you really want to LLM everything, I'd rather have a dedicated flag that provides correction/explanation of args while doing a dry-run. And another to analyze error messages.
vasco · 3h ago
I'm not saying if its a good idea or not, I'm saying it's my prediction of what will happen. Nobody will use old style terminals in a few years where you need to type exactly, is my prediction.
reed1 · 4h ago
This is what agent do, aichat [1] can do this. What you want is a wrapper for it to pipe the result back to LLM and make sure the command succeeded.
It would be insanity for every cli tool to wrap its own llama.cpp
There are plenty of terminal apps with this functionality, e.g. https://www.warp.dev/
sovietswag · 5h ago
Lollll ‘dd’ with autocorrect will be a hoot
vasco · 4h ago
Will be much useful than now, obviously it doesn't run it for you.
darkwater · 3h ago
How so? A potentially highly destructive command like `dd` (it can literally destroy all your local data in seconds) should be either touched with lot of care and having an idea of what you are doing, or not touched at all. Like some heavy machinery or a scalpel.
This whole repo is a single 300 LoC Python file over half of which is the system prompt and comments. It's not even a fine-tuned model or something, it's literally just a wrapper around llama-cpp with a very basic prompt tacked on.
I'm sure it's potentially useful and maybe even works, but I'm really sick of seeing these extremely low-effort projects posted and upvoted over and over.
{money-mouth face emoji}
I've seen LLM's do this in other languages as well but didn't realize there was a term for it. Wrapping entire function bodies in try/catch, at the very least please just wrap the caller so you don't have to indent the entire body for no reason. Not to mention a lot of commands inside can't even throw.
https://github.com/alfg/ffmpeg-commander
Haven't updated in a while, but it's a simplified web UI with a few example presets.
Edit: no, unrelated. Got confused with https://ffmpeg.app .
The example itself shows a naive conversion, ending up transcoding to default h.264 params. This should have been -c:v copy for copying the input packets, as-is.
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
This way user could directly review if it is suggesting something they want to go on with.
Also: I understand the privacy concerns, but basically any LLM that's large enough can act as a conversational UI to ffmpeg nowadays. Why would I want to add a specific one to do that?
Burying the line about it being a useful yet parody of a project at the very end helps no one understand as exactly for that point, this was sold as the latest and greatest, oh disclaimer, it really isn't.
Don't stop the work, but please remember to keep you intentions clear and your audience will understand.
Best of luck on your future projects!
Edit: Typo
https://github.com/scottvr/wtffmpeg/blob/main/wtffmpeg.py#L9...
>You are an expert at writing commands for the `ffmpeg` multimedia framework.
>Respond ONLY with the `ffmpeg` command. Do not add any explanations, introductory text, or markdown formatting.
Fragility of it aside, and the fact that more is written to try and force it to do less, this is basically the gist of the whole thing.
- User: "convert input.mov to a web-friendly mp4" - Assistant: ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4
Isn't exactly a web-friendly mp4. the fast start option is not used. this means the MooV header is at the end of the file instead of the head. that means the entire file must be read/scanned to get to the metadata when the browser requests it which means a long delay depending on the size of the file.
- User: "create a 10-second clip from my_movie.mkv starting at the 1 minute 30 second mark" - Assistant: ffmpeg -i my_movie.mkv -ss 00:01:30 -t 10 -c copy clip.mkv
this is another poor example, as it is again the slowest option by having the -ss after the -i. placing the -ss before the -i will result in the command being faster.
not really sure who is training this system on how to use ffmpeg, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that simple things like this are being missed. after this example, i just stopped looking
Not really, unless your server doesn’t support range requests, browsers are smart enough to request the end of the file where a non-faststart moov atom typically lives. But yes, you should use faststart.
You’re right that this appears to be the work of someone who’s not very adept at ffmpeg. Which shouldn’t be surprising; as a power user, maybe even expert at ffmpeg, unless I need to write a complex filter graph, consulting an LLM will just slow me down—people like me have no need for this.
English is not my mother tongue but I think the model should correct the user that it should be: "convert my_video.avi to mp4 without sound"
- argument syntax autocorrect
- natural language arguments instead of the actual ones should be accepted
- whenever there's an error executing, instead of just erroring out, the error should go through an LLM and output a proper explanation plus suggested fix
Doing command by command seems the wrong way about it though.
If you really want to LLM everything, I'd rather have a dedicated flag that provides correction/explanation of args while doing a dry-run. And another to analyze error messages.
[1] https://github.com/sigoden/aichat
There are plenty of terminal apps with this functionality, e.g. https://www.warp.dev/