{"slug": "ffmpeg", "name": "ffmpeg", "category": "terminal", "category_name": "Terminal and shell", "description": "Open-source command-line tool and libraries for recording, converting and streaming audio and video.", "recommenders": 25, "commenters": 60, "warners": 3, "score": 27.994, "rising": -0.22, "first": "2025-11-02", "latest": "2026-10-18", "why": "HN commenters treat it as the most capable free tool for converting, trimming and processing audio and video, and many now generate its commands with LLMs or run it in automated pipelines.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 26, "neutral": 33, "compare": 1, "warn": 3}, "spark": [3, 1, 3, 0, 2, 3, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Broad capability", "LLM-friendly"], "caveat": "Steep syntax", "short_quote": "I always end up using running FFmpeg directly since it's faster and more reliable", "icon": true, "domain": "ffmpeg.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://ffmpeg.org", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["ffmpeg", "FFmpeg"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters treat it as the most capable free tool for converting, trimming and processing audio and video", "cites": [{"id": 776176512, "item_id": 48511032, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511032", "by": "naturalmovement", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available.", "excerpt": "If there was a nearly inexhaustible supply of Indian security researchers emailing you a nearly inexhaustible supply of LLM slop daily, there is a point where you or I would stop caring too. ffmpeg is Free Software. You are also free not to use it. Oddly enough, despite all these endless grievances, no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available. Evidently no one car", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"}, {"id": 776960209, "item_id": 48560013, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560013", "by": "streaming", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks", "excerpt": "Having contributed x265 to FFmpeg, I quickly realized that the FFmpeg project will always get credit for all the many things a BUILD of FFmpeg can do. FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks, but the FFmpeg core is just a framework that links many other open-source libraries (most of which are separate open-source projects) in a build. FFmpeg certainly meets the functional requirements of a media ", "context": "contributed x265 to FFmpeg", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard"}, {"id": 796202416, "item_id": 49762651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762651", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv.", "excerpt": "Indeed. I remember that back on my old win-days. I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge s", "context": "Linux user since 2004", "use_case": "multimedia processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)"}, {"id": 758644032, "item_id": 47415252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415252", "by": "edgarvaldes", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the best open-source tools out there.", "excerpt": "One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.", "context": "", "use_case": "extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 8.1"}]}, {"text": ", and many now generate its commands with LLMs or run it in automated pipelines.", "cites": [{"id": 790766768, "item_id": 49422923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923", "by": "kodoman", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great.", "excerpt": "Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.", "context": "", "use_case": "video/media processing via LLM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 790762881, "item_id": 49422680, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422680", "by": "mentos", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC", "excerpt": "How many programs can dispense with 50% of their complexity by just offering an API for LLMs to execute? By way of example I use Kdenlive 90% less and just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC.", "context": "", "use_case": "crop/format video", "switched_from": "Kdenlive", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 748503680, "item_id": 46781480, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781480", "by": "simonw", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d", "excerpt": "I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/ Much as I love k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that. I love this new world where I can \"delegate my thinking\" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I wou", "context": "", "use_case": "making animated GIF from stream", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files"}, {"id": 756999008, "item_id": 47312438, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312438", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly", "excerpt": "tens of billions of executions per day is insane. i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly and even at that scale the process startup overhead is noticeable. the single-decode multi-output trick alone saved me like 40% wall time when i switched to it. cant imagine what those savings look like multiplied by 10 billion", "context": "runs automated video pipeline", "use_case": "automated video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale"}, {"id": 757821761, "item_id": 47363860, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363860", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly", "excerpt": "the confirm screen showing the actual command is lowkey the best part. i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly (concat demuxer + xfade + zoompan for ken burns) and honestly the only reason i got decent at it was reading the commands that other wrappers were generating under the hood. most ffmpeg GUIs hide that from you which defeats the purpose IMO - you end up dependent on the tool forever instead of actually learning", "context": "", "use_case": "video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: fftool \u2013 A Terminal UI for FFmpeg \u2013 Shows Command Before It Runs"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that its command syntax is hard to learn and remember", "cites": [{"id": 790766768, "item_id": 49422923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923", "by": "kodoman", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great.", "excerpt": "Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.", "context": "", "use_case": "video/media processing via LLM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 742505313, "item_id": 46406582, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406582", "by": "nextstep", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right.", "excerpt": "This is very nice. When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right. On a side note (I\u2019m not a web developer), why would a command line tool like this be written and distributed using node.js? Seems like an unnecessary risk to use JavaScript for a basic (local) command line tool. Couldn\u2019t this be written more simply in like Rust or something?", "context": "not a web developer", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}, {"id": 742535521, "item_id": 46408470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408470", "by": "foundart", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today", "excerpt": "The github repo link from the npm page doesn't work, so I guess the author had second thoughts. I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today, or rather Gemini and Claude were fighting it. Task: create a video that is a pan across a photo, followed by a scale/zoom. Probably easy for some people, but I had no clue and the LLMs weren't doing that well either. Things took a turn for the better when I asked Gemini for an alte", "context": "", "use_case": "pan and zoom video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}, {"id": 733053248, "item_id": 45815828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815828", "by": "somat", "date": "2025-11-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "all the tricky bits are internal to ffmpeg", "excerpt": "The thing that helped me get over that ffmpeg bump, where you go from copying stack overflow answers to actually sort of understanding what you are doing is the fairly recent include external file syntax. On the surface it is such a minor thing, but mentally it let me turn what was a confusing mess into a programing language. There are a couple ways to evoke it but the one I used was to load the whole file as an arg.", "context": "", "use_case": "motion detection on camera feed", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chaining FFmpeg with a Browser Agent"}]}, {"text": ", and some also raise security concerns about bugs in its codecs.", "cites": [{"id": 796006929, "item_id": 49750433, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750433", "by": "nikcub", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs", "excerpt": "Reading the patch[0] for libheif the bug which lead to the vuln was around bounds checking for image overlays. the container can have multiple images and you can compose them in the output. heif also supports rotating, cropping, alpha channels, thumbnails and a ton of other features that a web forum where a user is uploading photos or screenshots doesn't need. It's a much, much larger attack surface than plain old sc", "context": "", "use_case": "media decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos"}, {"id": 786792384, "item_id": 49174524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174524", "by": "SahAssar", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love ffmpeg but that whole episode left a bit of a bad taste.", "excerpt": "They claimed that this was not a problem since the codec was so uncommon, but without doing steps like removing it from the main tree or making it not built by default in major distros. I understand that from the perspective of \"how many people will this crash for\", but from a security perspective it is nonsensical. Even if it is an uncommon codec if the authors decide to keep the codepath there by default it is expl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Broad capability", "summary": "Seen as covering almost every multimedia task, with no better free alternative.", "quotes": [{"id": 796202416, "item_id": 49762651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762651", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv.", "excerpt": "Indeed. I remember that back on my old win-days. I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge s", "context": "Linux user since 2004", "use_case": "multimedia processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)"}, {"id": 776960209, "item_id": 48560013, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560013", "by": "streaming", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks", "excerpt": "Having contributed x265 to FFmpeg, I quickly realized that the FFmpeg project will always get credit for all the many things a BUILD of FFmpeg can do. FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks, but the FFmpeg core is just a framework that links many other open-source libraries (most of which are separate open-source projects) in a build. FFmpeg certainly meets the functional requirements of a media ", "context": "contributed x265 to FFmpeg", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard"}, {"id": 776176512, "item_id": 48511032, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511032", "by": "naturalmovement", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available.", "excerpt": "If there was a nearly inexhaustible supply of Indian security researchers emailing you a nearly inexhaustible supply of LLM slop daily, there is a point where you or I would stop caring too. ffmpeg is Free Software. You are also free not to use it. Oddly enough, despite all these endless grievances, no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available. Evidently no one car", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"}]}, {"label": "LLM-friendly", "summary": "LLMs and agents can write its commands, which replaces some GUI editing work.", "quotes": [{"id": 790766768, "item_id": 49422923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923", "by": "kodoman", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great.", "excerpt": "Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.", "context": "", "use_case": "video/media processing via LLM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 790762881, "item_id": 49422680, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422680", "by": "mentos", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC", "excerpt": "How many programs can dispense with 50% of their complexity by just offering an API for LLMs to execute? By way of example I use Kdenlive 90% less and just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC.", "context": "", "use_case": "crop/format video", "switched_from": "Kdenlive", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 770850370, "item_id": 48178148, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178148", "by": "Hard_Space", "date": "2026-05-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG", "excerpt": "I need Photoshop for an almost vanishingly small subset of all the things it is capable of, and this holds true for nearly all 'full-fledged' software that I use. So what may not be surfacing, in the absence of vibe-coded Photoshops, is the growing local script collections of many users. Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of t", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?"}]}, {"label": "Automation", "summary": "Used daily in scripted pipelines for video assembly and transcoding fleets.", "quotes": [{"id": 756999008, "item_id": 47312438, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312438", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly", "excerpt": "tens of billions of executions per day is insane. i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly and even at that scale the process startup overhead is noticeable. the single-decode multi-output trick alone saved me like 40% wall time when i switched to it. cant imagine what those savings look like multiplied by 10 billion", "context": "runs automated video pipeline", "use_case": "automated video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale"}, {"id": 757821761, "item_id": 47363860, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363860", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly", "excerpt": "the confirm screen showing the actual command is lowkey the best part. i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly (concat demuxer + xfade + zoompan for ken burns) and honestly the only reason i got decent at it was reading the commands that other wrappers were generating under the hood. most ffmpeg GUIs hide that from you which defeats the purpose IMO - you end up dependent on the tool forever instead of actually learning", "context": "", "use_case": "video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: fftool \u2013 A Terminal UI for FFmpeg \u2013 Shows Command Before It Runs"}, {"id": 742000833, "item_id": 46375052, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375052", "by": "christophilus", "date": "2025-12-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I\u2019ve used Netcup to run an ffmpeg transcoding fleet", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve used Netcup to run an ffmpeg transcoding fleet, stored in Wasabi, served via BunnyCDN. It worked great, and I had total control of everything. You might also check out Bunny\u2019s video services which didn\u2019t exist when I built out my solution.", "context": "", "use_case": "video transcoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Stream + Backblaze vs. GCP for Short Form Video?"}]}, {"label": "Everyday conversions", "summary": "Used to extract subtitles, trim videos, rewrap DV footage and convert music formats.", "quotes": [{"id": 758644032, "item_id": 47415252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415252", "by": "edgarvaldes", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the best open-source tools out there.", "excerpt": "One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.", "context": "", "use_case": "extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 8.1"}, {"id": 734176721, "item_id": 45886045, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886045", "by": "ErroneousBosh", "date": "2025-11-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it", "excerpt": "If you have a lot of Video8 or Hi8 tapes to digitise, get a Digital8 camcorder. It will most likely play them back quite happily and emit DV over its Firewire port. Digital8 is just DV on a different tape! I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sor", "context": "shoots DV tapes with old cameras, about 25 years of experience", "use_case": "rewrapping DV streams", "switched_from": "", "story": "Automating our home video imports"}, {"id": 740589553, "item_id": 46286847, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286847", "by": "Pfeil", "date": "2025-12-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "convert from the highest available format available, often FLAC, to opus using ffmpegs default settings. No regrets so far.", "excerpt": "I use it for my music files and audio books as it is smaller than mp3. In average it was around 1/3 less space used, I think. I do not hear a difference, but just to make sure I usually convert from the highest available format available, often FLAC, to opus using ffmpegs default settings. No regrets so far. Doing this for a few years now.", "context": "", "use_case": "converting audio to Opus", "switched_from": "", "story": "Opus 1.6 Released \u2013 Interactive Audio Codec"}]}, {"label": "Free and open", "summary": "Commenters use it in place of paid suites and call it top-notch open-source software.", "quotes": [{"id": 765199921, "item_id": 47824995, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824995", "by": "Tanoc", "date": "2026-04-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.", "excerpt": "I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 ", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "Adobe CS6 Suite", "story": "The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe"}, {"id": 736601537, "item_id": 46037596, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037596", "by": "dakiol", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "top-notch software (e.g., linux, ffmpeg, qemu, etc.)", "excerpt": "LLMs subscriptions. Ideally I wouldn't need to pay for top-notch software (e.g., linux, ffmpeg, qemu, etc.), but here we are.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What tools do you pay for today that feel overpriced or frustrating?"}, {"id": 758644032, "item_id": 47415252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415252", "by": "edgarvaldes", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the best open-source tools out there.", "excerpt": "One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.", "context": "", "use_case": "extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 8.1"}]}, {"label": "Speed and reliability", "summary": "Running it directly is described as faster and more reliable than browser-based builds.", "quotes": [{"id": 765750512, "item_id": 47859407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859407", "by": "alfg", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I always end up using running FFmpeg directly since it's faster and more reliable", "excerpt": "Looks good. Good work on shipping! I love seeing video applications utilizing Web Assembly. However, it usually falls short in when it comes to longer video in the browser's sandboxed environment. How is the performance? Curious if you've tried using the FFmpeg libraries directly (libav), rather than compiling all of FFMpeg to WASM? I always end up using running FFmpeg directly since it's faster and more reliable, bu", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files"}, {"id": 782739056, "item_id": 48921191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921191", "by": "Hasz", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.", "excerpt": "feature velocity >> feature stability. Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before. If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}, {"id": 778373360, "item_id": 48648335, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648335", "by": "jjcm", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "ffmpeg conversion: 1,515 bytes, 0.05s", "excerpt": "Neat. I tested it and here were my results: ffmpeg conversion: 1,515 bytes, 0.05s zgif conversion: 1,479 bytes, 90.1s I used cursor to port it to rust as well, and it got the conversion time down to 20s. Still likely not worth it as even with the rust port it's a 400x increase in processing time (that scales exponentially) for a ~2% decrease in size.", "context": "", "use_case": "GIF conversion", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lossless GIF recompression via exhaustive search"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Steep syntax", "summary": "Commands are hard to remember, and even LLM-written ones often take several tries.", "quotes": [{"id": 790766768, "item_id": 49422923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923", "by": "kodoman", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great.", "excerpt": "Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.", "context": "", "use_case": "video/media processing via LLM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 742505313, "item_id": 46406582, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406582", "by": "nextstep", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right.", "excerpt": "This is very nice. When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right. On a side note (I\u2019m not a web developer), why would a command line tool like this be written and distributed using node.js? Seems like an unnecessary risk to use JavaScript for a basic (local) command line tool. Couldn\u2019t this be written more simply in like Rust or something?", "context": "not a web developer", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}, {"id": 742535521, "item_id": 46408470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408470", "by": "foundart", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today", "excerpt": "The github repo link from the npm page doesn't work, so I guess the author had second thoughts. I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today, or rather Gemini and Claude were fighting it. Task: create a video that is a pan across a photo, followed by a scale/zoom. Probably easy for some people, but I had no clue and the LLMs weren't doing that well either. Things took a turn for the better when I asked Gemini for an alte", "context": "", "use_case": "pan and zoom video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}]}, {"label": "Parameter tuning", "summary": "Finding the right encoding settings can take a lot of trial and error.", "quotes": [{"id": 741532096, "item_id": 46345756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345756", "by": "cmbernard333", "date": "2025-12-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I am still trying to find the exact parameters for FFMPEG", "excerpt": "I have been converting my H265 (HVEC) collection to AV1. I am still trying to find the exact parameters for FFMPEG to produce the optimal output for the devices I use plex on. Its been a little bit of whack a mole so far, but it seems ideal for file size when I get it right.", "context": "", "use_case": "convert H265 to AV1", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I learned about deploying AV1 from two deployers"}, {"id": 754131056, "item_id": 47133191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133191", "by": "umairnadeem123", "date": "2026-02-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "tuning ffmpeg parameters", "excerpt": "the real shift is that throwaway code became viable for production workflows. i used to spend days writing reusable utility libraries. now i generate single-purpose scripts, run them once, and delete them. the economics of code reuse have fundamentally changed when generation is cheaper than comprehension. the downstream bottleneck is real though. built a video production pipeline recently - generating the python glu", "context": "", "use_case": "video production pipeline", "switched_from": "", "story": "Writing code is cheap now"}]}, {"label": "Security", "summary": "Commenters cite bugs in uncommon codecs that ship enabled by default.", "quotes": [{"id": 796006929, "item_id": 49750433, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750433", "by": "nikcub", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs", "excerpt": "Reading the patch[0] for libheif the bug which lead to the vuln was around bounds checking for image overlays. the container can have multiple images and you can compose them in the output. heif also supports rotating, cropping, alpha channels, thumbnails and a ton of other features that a web forum where a user is uploading photos or screenshots doesn't need. It's a much, much larger attack surface than plain old sc", "context": "", "use_case": "media decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos"}, {"id": 786792384, "item_id": 49174524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174524", "by": "SahAssar", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love ffmpeg but that whole episode left a bit of a bad taste.", "excerpt": "They claimed that this was not a problem since the codec was so uncommon, but without doing steps like removing it from the main tree or making it not built by default in major distros. I understand that from the perspective of \"how many people will this crash for\", but from a security perspective it is nonsensical. Even if it is an uncommon codec if the authors decide to keep the codepath there by default it is expl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}, {"id": 776176512, "item_id": 48511032, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511032", "by": "naturalmovement", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available.", "excerpt": "If there was a nearly inexhaustible supply of Indian security researchers emailing you a nearly inexhaustible supply of LLM slop daily, there is a point where you or I would stop caring too. ffmpeg is Free Software. You are also free not to use it. Oddly enough, despite all these endless grievances, no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available. Evidently no one car", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"}]}, {"label": "Encoding glitches", "summary": "One user reported pops and clicks in songs encoded for an iPod nano.", "quotes": [{"id": 780063312, "item_id": 48753957, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48753957", "by": "functionmouse", "date": "2026-07-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Last time I used ffmpeg to encode songs for my iPod nano they were broken; playback was interrupted by pops and clicks every few seconds.", "excerpt": "Last time I used ffmpeg to encode songs for my iPod nano they were broken; playback was interrupted by pops and clicks every few seconds. I wonder if this is fixed now?", "context": "", "use_case": "encoding songs to AAC", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"}]}, {"label": "GUI sometimes easier", "summary": "One commenter finds some complex tasks more comfortable in Avidemux.", "quotes": [{"id": 743454161, "item_id": 46465885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465885", "by": "jokoon", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "ffmpeg is still what I use", "excerpt": "I wish he talked about avidemux. It's a simple tool which is great for many things, it has filters and there are most of the formats. I think it uses ffmpeg under the hood. It's an old tool but it's fine for most things, when ffmpeg is to fastidious to use. ffmpeg is still what I use, but some more complex tasks are just more comfortable with avidemux.", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File"}]}], "who": [{"by": "shevy-java", "context": "Linux user since 2004", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762651", "date": "2026-09-19"}, {"by": "sylware", "context": "writes own minimal software for Linux", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49133358", "date": "2026-08-01"}, {"by": "streaming", "context": "contributed x265 to FFmpeg", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560013", "date": "2026-06-16"}, {"by": "tcbrah", "context": "runs automated video pipeline", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312438", "date": "2026-03-09"}, {"by": "nextstep", "context": "not a web developer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406582", "date": "2025-12-27"}, {"by": "mesadb", "context": "built a macOS dictation app", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983519", "date": "2025-11-19"}, {"by": "ErroneousBosh", "context": "shoots DV tapes with old cameras, about 25 years of experience", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886045", "date": "2025-11-11"}], "tags": ["for Linux users", "for automated video pipelines", "for LLM-assisted workflows", "for home media libraries"], "use_cases": ["video processing", "media processing", "multimedia processing", "media decoding", "video encoding", "creating demo videos"], "compared": [{"slug": "mpv", "name": "mpv", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "yt-dlp", "name": "yt-dlp", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "kdenlive", "name": "Kdenlive", "co": 2, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gemini", "name": "Gemini", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "imagemagick", "name": "ImageMagick", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "elevenlabs", "name": "ElevenLabs", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166202", "title": "FFmpeg 9.0", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836374", "title": "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421554", "title": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747116", "title": "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510046", "title": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303111", "title": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 4, "recommend": 3}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 4, "recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 5, "recommend": 2}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 3}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 3, "compare": 1}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 2, "neutral": 3}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 5}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 3, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 802272914, "item_id": 50142057, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142057", "by": "aavisangle", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use claude with remotion and ffmpeg to create final video.", "excerpt": "I use claude with remotion and ffmpeg to create final video.", "context": "", "use_case": "creating demo videos", "switched_from": "", "story": "Survey: How do you create the video demo for your project or product?"}, {"id": 801953840, "item_id": 50122115, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122115", "by": "Metricon", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "for anyone interested in converting images to AVIF, here's what I've found to work the best", "excerpt": "AVIF is fantastic format and I use it in my production applications. Spent quite a bit of time looking to the best settings (at least for up to 2k images) and for anyone interested in converting images to AVIF, here's what I've found to work the best for creating the smallest size (10x+ smaller) while still retaining good quality and even supports PNG transparency: ffmpeg -i {input_file} -filter_complex \"[0:v]format=", "context": "", "use_case": "converting images to AVIF", "switched_from": "", "story": "JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases"}, {"id": 798105827, "item_id": 49881614, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49881614", "by": "scosman", "date": "2026-09-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using ffmpeg for audio", "excerpt": "These AI explainers are taking over. I tried getting this working back in May. The models were okay but not quite there and it was a ton of effort. Opus 5.5 seems like the tipping point. I made an OSS framework for these for when you want to go beyond one-shoting it: https://github.com/scosman/videowright - Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and ", "context": "", "use_case": "audio editing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: HN.watch \u2013 Videos of all Hacker News posts"}, {"id": 797489506, "item_id": 49843094, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843094", "by": "ndom91", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a local copy of ffmpeg", "excerpt": "Sorry opencomputer :sweat_smile: But made a local fork that works just as well with 'claude-code -p' and a local copy of ffmpeg https://github.com/ndom91/shipvideo-local", "context": "", "use_case": "video rendering", "switched_from": "", "story": "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"}, {"id": 797428994, "item_id": 49839312, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49839312", "by": "scosman", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using ffmpeg for audio", "excerpt": "I have an OSS framework for this: https://github.com/scosman/videowright - Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover - can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio. - interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds - MP4 export/encoder - Generates the video with agent of your choi", "context": "", "use_case": "audio scene reordering", "switched_from": "", "story": "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"}, {"id": 796202416, "item_id": 49762651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762651", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv.", "excerpt": "Indeed. I remember that back on my old win-days. I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge s", "context": "Linux user since 2004", "use_case": "multimedia processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)"}, {"id": 796006929, "item_id": 49750433, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750433", "by": "nikcub", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "there have been tons of bugs in ffmpeg and imagemagick and the core libs", "excerpt": "Reading the patch[0] for libheif the bug which lead to the vuln was around bounds checking for image overlays. the container can have multiple images and you can compose them in the output. heif also supports rotating, cropping, alpha channels, thumbnails and a ton of other features that a web forum where a user is uploading photos or screenshots doesn't need. It's a much, much larger attack surface than plain old sc", "context": "", "use_case": "media decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos"}, {"id": 793958835, "item_id": 49622427, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622427", "by": "josephg", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "AAC streams are decoded and sent to ffmpeg.", "excerpt": "A few weeks ago I used claude to reverse engineer the linux version of resolve to add support for AAC media. The patch is here, and it works great: https://github.com/josephg/resolve-aacfix AAC streams are decoded and sent to ffmpeg.", "context": "", "use_case": "decoding AAC audio", "switched_from": "", "story": "DaVinci Resolve 21.1"}, {"id": 790766768, "item_id": 49422923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923", "by": "kodoman", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great.", "excerpt": "Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.", "context": "", "use_case": "video/media processing via LLM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 790762881, "item_id": 49422680, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422680", "by": "mentos", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC", "excerpt": "How many programs can dispense with 50% of their complexity by just offering an API for LLMs to execute? By way of example I use Kdenlive 90% less and just use Codex to issue the ffmpeg CLI commands directly when I want to crop/format video on my PC.", "context": "", "use_case": "crop/format video", "switched_from": "Kdenlive", "story": "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"}, {"id": 789802064, "item_id": 49362629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49362629", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-08-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv", "excerpt": "> Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think. Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv Problem solved. > a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed. > [...] spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like Well, this was quite easy on debian, but I abandoned being a slave to distributions. I compile f", "context": "", "use_case": "media playback on Linux", "switched_from": "", "story": "A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux"}, {"id": 786792384, "item_id": 49174524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174524", "by": "SahAssar", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love ffmpeg but that whole episode left a bit of a bad taste.", "excerpt": "They claimed that this was not a problem since the codec was so uncommon, but without doing steps like removing it from the main tree or making it not built by default in major distros. I understand that from the perspective of \"how many people will this crash for\", but from a security perspective it is nonsensical. Even if it is an uncommon codec if the authors decide to keep the codepath there by default it is expl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}, {"id": 786671649, "item_id": 49166978, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166978", "by": "timonoko", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Only slightly broken already.", "excerpt": "Only slightly broken already. Dont remember the details, but Gemini could not this to work just by reading the manual. https://github.com/timonoko/Skipperi", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}, {"id": 786670752, "item_id": 49166922, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166922", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "ffmpeg is great, I think nobody disputes this.", "excerpt": "Seems Michael Niedermayer wrote that manually, without AI. Good for him. :P ffmpeg is great, I think nobody disputes this. I use it in two ways mostly: 1) one, via mpv, and 2) two, as conversion tool primarily ffmpeg also has many really powerful filters, but these are very confusing to use IMO and not elegant at all. I'd wish we could use some kind of simple meta-language or so, in part similar to virtualdub/avisynt", "context": "", "use_case": "media conversion", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}, {"id": 786664384, "item_id": 49166524, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166524", "by": "richardstahl", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "amazing project", "excerpt": "I recommend watching the Lex Fridman interview with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya. Amazing work on and amazing project.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.0"}, {"id": 786396546, "item_id": 49149784, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149784", "by": "pseudocomposer", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "build out ffmpeg/imagemagick image/video resizing", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been working on an Elm rewrite of the React FE of my federated social media service, Jonline (https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline). It\u2019s up at https://jonline.io (and https://bullcity.social and http://oakcity.social). Agents have been huge for me. In addition to the Elm app, I used them to: - build out ffmpeg/imagemagick image/video resizing - unify all my servers behind one Traefik ingress - build proper cros", "context": "", "use_case": "video resizing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 786133729, "item_id": 49133358, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49133358", "by": "sylware", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "my own ffmpeg based x11 media player", "excerpt": "It is never really for \"One\". If it is open source and published, It may be use by others... not to mention coding AI ML (Machine Learing), then for many. I have written so much software for one... I cannot recall everything. I use some of it daily: - I have my custom elf(glibc)/linux distro - I use my own ffmpeg based x11 media player (will have an update for wayland). - Since the \"geniuses\" at gogol blocked all acc", "context": "writes own minimal software for Linux", "use_case": "media player backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software for One"}, {"id": 784964945, "item_id": 49060309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060309", "by": "westurner", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I started working on the codec, MAV (Mu Animation Video), in ffmpeg", "excerpt": "From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261684 : > Can any aircraft navigation system plot drone Remote ID beacons on a map? > How sensitive of a sensor array is necessary to trilaterate Remote ID signals and birds for aircraft collision avoidance? Could aircraft locate birds with CSI Channel State Information? > A Multispectral sensor array (standard) would probably be most robust. I started working on adding we", "context": "", "use_case": "developing video codec", "switched_from": "", "story": "An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk"}, {"id": 782739056, "item_id": 48921191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921191", "by": "Hasz", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.", "excerpt": "feature velocity >> feature stability. Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before. If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}, {"id": 782710736, "item_id": 48919421, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48919421", "by": "lukewarm707", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "and it deals with ffmpeg", "excerpt": "well, yes, my agent does have root access to my personal pc and the keys to my pass manager. its not autonomous and runs local llms, i use it to run terminal commands in natural language. so its more like a better version of the terminal. eg 'here are 25 audio files, combine them, write a transcript' and it deals with ffmpeg", "context": "", "use_case": "combining audio files", "switched_from": "", "story": "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"}, {"id": 781002083, "item_id": 48812630, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812630", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "FFmpeg drive by flash", "excerpt": "Your project reminds me of something I built a while ago using Pollination.ai for images, Gemini Flash for script / captions / inserting transitions and all other editing, Google Cloud TTS for narration/voice, and FFmpeg drive by flash, back then Gemini Flash 2.5 (free) is what i used for these experiments. The result looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IhGR8AC3a_g Uploaded on sep 24, 2024. I wasn't happ", "context": "", "use_case": "video editing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Instantvideos.org \u2013 short documentaries in ~30 seconds"}, {"id": 780431746, "item_id": 48776984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776984", "by": "ksec", "date": "2026-07-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So this is extremely promising.", "excerpt": "AAC-LC is ubiquitous, the only other codec that is wider spread is MP3 and only by negligible margin. AAC-LC, the earliest version of AAC has been declared as patent free or all patents expired by Redhat for many years already. AAC-LC was always designed for 128Kbps+ in mind. There are other AAC like HE-AAC and xHE-AAC aiming at lower bitrate. The current best AAC-LC encoder is done by Apple's Core Audio and most peo", "context": "", "use_case": "AAC audio encoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"}, {"id": 780063312, "item_id": 48753957, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48753957", "by": "functionmouse", "date": "2026-07-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Last time I used ffmpeg to encode songs for my iPod nano they were broken; playback was interrupted by pops and clicks every few seconds.", "excerpt": "Last time I used ffmpeg to encode songs for my iPod nano they were broken; playback was interrupted by pops and clicks every few seconds. I wonder if this is fixed now?", "context": "", "use_case": "encoding songs to AAC", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"}, {"id": 778845088, "item_id": 48677818, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677818", "by": "andros", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used ffmpeg to pre-download the video", "excerpt": "There's not much of a secret here; I used ffmpeg to pre-download the video\u2014there's... no actual streaming. When you select a video, it downloads in parallel and starts playing. Sorry to disappoint you :)", "context": "", "use_case": "downloading video for playback", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built a GPU back end for Emacs"}, {"id": 778373360, "item_id": 48648335, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648335", "by": "jjcm", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "ffmpeg conversion: 1,515 bytes, 0.05s", "excerpt": "Neat. I tested it and here were my results: ffmpeg conversion: 1,515 bytes, 0.05s zgif conversion: 1,479 bytes, 90.1s I used cursor to port it to rust as well, and it got the conversion time down to 20s. Still likely not worth it as even with the rust port it's a 400x increase in processing time (that scales exponentially) for a ~2% decrease in size.", "context": "", "use_case": "GIF conversion", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lossless GIF recompression via exhaustive search"}, {"id": 778331112, "item_id": 48645694, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645694", "by": "unmanageduck", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Video encoding: Ffmpeg", "excerpt": "Package manager: Nix(alternative to homebrew) https://nixos.org/download/#nix-install-macos Package management: Nix-darwin https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin Browsers: - Librewolf https://librewolf.net - Tor https://www.torproject.org - Orion https://orionbrowser.com Video downloader: Yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp Video/audio player: Mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv Video editor: LosslessCut http", "context": "", "use_case": "video encoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: New clean macOS install. Must-have apps? Best browser?"}, {"id": 776960209, "item_id": 48560013, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48560013", "by": "streaming", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks", "excerpt": "Having contributed x265 to FFmpeg, I quickly realized that the FFmpeg project will always get credit for all the many things a BUILD of FFmpeg can do. FFmpeg is certainly the king of media processing frameworks, but the FFmpeg core is just a framework that links many other open-source libraries (most of which are separate open-source projects) in a build. FFmpeg certainly meets the functional requirements of a media ", "context": "contributed x265 to FFmpeg", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard"}, {"id": 776258656, "item_id": 48516166, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516166", "by": "dspillett", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "that is currently sandboxed ffmpeg", "excerpt": "> the obvious alternative to ffmpeg IIRC that is currently sandboxed ffmpeg. Until the people going on about making an equivalent in pure rust being better, stop taking about it and actually get on with making it, of course!", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"}, {"id": 776176512, "item_id": 48511032, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511032", "by": "naturalmovement", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available.", "excerpt": "If there was a nearly inexhaustible supply of Indian security researchers emailing you a nearly inexhaustible supply of LLM slop daily, there is a point where you or I would stop caring too. ffmpeg is Free Software. You are also free not to use it. Oddly enough, despite all these endless grievances, no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available. Evidently no one car", "context": "", "use_case": "media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"}, {"id": 774926352, "item_id": 48432897, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432897", "by": "Pbhaskal", "date": "2026-06-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "A simple cat cam slash timelapse camera using old Nokia phone, termux API, golang and ffmpeg.", "excerpt": "A simple cat cam slash timelapse camera using old Nokia phone, termux API, golang and ffmpeg. https://github.com/prembhaskal/prem-nokia-android/tree/main/timelapse", "context": "", "use_case": "cat cam timelapse", "switched_from": "", "story": "The \"Cat-Cam\": Using Go and an Old Nokia Android to Catch a Midnight Intruder"}, {"id": 774428465, "item_id": 48401779, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401779", "by": "Yen", "date": "2026-06-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This video was sampled into individual image frames at about 5fps using ffmpeg.", "excerpt": "I recently got into splatting. I looked for some good all-in-one tutorials, but didn't find any, and mostly muddled through through trial and error and LLM assistance. I present this workflow as a straight-line pipeline, though in practice it took a lot of iteration and backtracking and rework to get the final result. Here's what worked for me: I captured a video on a smartphone camera, using the OpenCamera app. Spec", "context": "", "use_case": "extracting frames from video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gaussian Point Splatting"}, {"id": 771699059, "item_id": 48231191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231191", "by": "carpo", "date": "2026-05-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I made it a local Electron app with Whisper, ffmpeg", "excerpt": "This is great. I wish I had enough ram for a local model. I just spent the last few weeks writing something very similar, but I made it a local Electron app with Whisper, ffmpeg and I added semantic search and embeddings for chatting with the videos. It talks to Claude for the vision analysis, tagging and video chat. Do you only send one image for yours? I used a customised scene detection algorithm to find multiple ", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap)"}, {"id": 770850370, "item_id": 48178148, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178148", "by": "Hard_Space", "date": "2026-05-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG", "excerpt": "I need Photoshop for an almost vanishingly small subset of all the things it is capable of, and this holds true for nearly all 'full-fledged' software that I use. So what may not be surfacing, in the absence of vibe-coded Photoshops, is the growing local script collections of many users. Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of t", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted media processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?"}, {"id": 765750512, "item_id": 47859407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859407", "by": "alfg", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I always end up using running FFmpeg directly since it's faster and more reliable", "excerpt": "Looks good. Good work on shipping! I love seeing video applications utilizing Web Assembly. However, it usually falls short in when it comes to longer video in the browser's sandboxed environment. How is the performance? Curious if you've tried using the FFmpeg libraries directly (libav), rather than compiling all of FFMpeg to WASM? I always end up using running FFmpeg directly since it's faster and more reliable, bu", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files"}, {"id": 765199921, "item_id": 47824995, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824995", "by": "Tanoc", "date": "2026-04-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.", "excerpt": "I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 ", "context": "", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "Adobe CS6 Suite", "story": "The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe"}, {"id": 765046530, "item_id": 47815408, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815408", "by": "aleda145", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.", "excerpt": "I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling! I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can. Creating \"non standard\" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg", "context": "", "use_case": "custom video resolutions", "switched_from": "", "story": "State of Kdenlive"}, {"id": 763897253, "item_id": 47743578, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743578", "by": "spudlyo", "date": "2026-04-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "transcode the audio with ffmpeg", "excerpt": "I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, Latin. I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nic", "context": "", "use_case": "audio transcoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"}, {"id": 763650451, "item_id": 47728153, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728153", "by": "FuzjaJadrowa", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been using yt-dlp and ffmpeg extensively for a while now", "excerpt": "Hi HN, I've been using yt-dlp and ffmpeg extensively for a while now, but I've always fiddled with terminal commands or used clunky online tools that aren't always reliable. While there are plenty of downloaders and converters on the market, I wanted to make something myself, just for fun. I wanted a dedicated, locally focused interface that combined downloading, conversion, and compression in one place. I initially ", "context": "", "use_case": "converting and compressing video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pulsar \u2013 Lightweight cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and yt-dlp, built with Tauri"}, {"id": 763595937, "item_id": 47724746, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724746", "by": "tnelsond4", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been enthusiastic about a lot of things, C, libsdl, Linux, ffmpeg, vim", "excerpt": "Naw, developers will always be enthusiastic about stuff even if it's crap. I used to really like SQLite and think that I should use it for everything, but after using it for a couple years I realized it's just not the right tool for most things. It doesn't help that I usually mess up my joins and lead to undetected data loss. I really wanted to use SQLite client side for the data in my dictionary web app, but I ended", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "\"It's rare that developers love their database that much\""}, {"id": 759994098, "item_id": 47499631, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499631", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-03-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "which in turn uses ffmpeg of course", "excerpt": "Winamp was pretty cool. When I switched to Linux, many years ago, I wanted to have winamp too. I think I used bmp for a while until it died; before that xmms but that one also sort of died. Meanwhile some other GUI showed up, I forgot the name. I kind of gave up on winamp, mostly because my use cases shifted. I went to mplayer, then mpv, and now I am too used to using mpv for literally anything related to audio and v", "context": "", "use_case": "media decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp"}, {"id": 758644032, "item_id": 47415252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415252", "by": "edgarvaldes", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the best open-source tools out there.", "excerpt": "One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.", "context": "", "use_case": "extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg 8.1"}, {"id": 757821761, "item_id": 47363860, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363860", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly", "excerpt": "the confirm screen showing the actual command is lowkey the best part. i use ffmpeg daily for video assembly (concat demuxer + xfade + zoompan for ken burns) and honestly the only reason i got decent at it was reading the commands that other wrappers were generating under the hood. most ffmpeg GUIs hide that from you which defeats the purpose IMO - you end up dependent on the tool forever instead of actually learning", "context": "", "use_case": "video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: fftool \u2013 A Terminal UI for FFmpeg \u2013 Shows Command Before It Runs"}, {"id": 756999008, "item_id": 47312438, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312438", "by": "tcbrah", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly", "excerpt": "tens of billions of executions per day is insane. i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly and even at that scale the process startup overhead is noticeable. the single-decode multi-output trick alone saved me like 40% wall time when i switched to it. cant imagine what those savings look like multiplied by 10 billion", "context": "runs automated video pipeline", "use_case": "automated video assembly", "switched_from": "", "story": "FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale"}, {"id": 748503680, "item_id": 46781480, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781480", "by": "simonw", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d", "excerpt": "I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/ Much as I love k\u0101k\u0101p\u014d there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that. I love this new world where I can \"delegate my thinking\" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I wou", "context": "", "use_case": "making animated GIF from stream", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files"}, {"id": 742535521, "item_id": 46408470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408470", "by": "foundart", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today", "excerpt": "The github repo link from the npm page doesn't work, so I guess the author had second thoughts. I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today, or rather Gemini and Claude were fighting it. Task: create a video that is a pan across a photo, followed by a scale/zoom. Probably easy for some people, but I had no clue and the LLMs weren't doing that well either. Things took a turn for the better when I asked Gemini for an alte", "context": "", "use_case": "pan and zoom video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}, {"id": 742505313, "item_id": 46406582, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406582", "by": "nextstep", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right.", "excerpt": "This is very nice. When I use ffmpeg recently I usually ask an LLM first but it often takes a few tries to get the exact incantation right. On a side note (I\u2019m not a web developer), why would a command line tool like this be written and distributed using node.js? Seems like an unnecessary risk to use JavaScript for a basic (local) command line tool. Couldn\u2019t this be written more simply in like Rust or something?", "context": "not a web developer", "use_case": "video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg \u2013 Video editing in plain English"}, {"id": 733053248, "item_id": 45815828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815828", "by": "somat", "date": "2025-11-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "all the tricky bits are internal to ffmpeg", "excerpt": "The thing that helped me get over that ffmpeg bump, where you go from copying stack overflow answers to actually sort of understanding what you are doing is the fairly recent include external file syntax. On the surface it is such a minor thing, but mentally it let me turn what was a confusing mess into a programing language. There are a couple ways to evoke it but the one I used was to load the whole file as an arg.", "context": "", "use_case": "motion detection on camera feed", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chaining FFmpeg with a Browser Agent"}]}