Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser
https://vidmix.app/ffmpeg-in-plain-english/
I found that I am using ChatGPT more and more to get the FFmpeg command I need, but the process can be a bit tedious: copy-pasting commands, dealing with input file names and locations, making sure the prompt contains enough info about the input files.This site attempts to solve that. You just describe what you want to do, pick the input files and an LLM (currently DeepSeek) generates the FFmpeg command. You can then run it directly in your browser or use the command elsewhere.
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I use it a lot to convert videos and turn a folder of tiff files into pngs at 1/2 size, etc. It's great at generating FFMEG commands and chaining the right tools together.
[1] https://www.warp.dev
I have used it for ffmpeg and then a lot of other slightly more complex commands. A recent one from the other day was gathering up all of the .epub documents in a directory tree, renaming them to the name of the directory they were in, and then placing them all in one single directory. That would have been a whole project for me, and Warp gave me the command with just that description. Any LLM interface would have done the same, but Warp just let me hit "Enter" and run it, no need to copy and paste.
Just for my own development curiosity, was there anything specific you had to do to get ffmpegwasm to work?
https://codeberg.org/gruf/go-ffmpreg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410637
I then made a more general version of it for all commands:
https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme
Example usage:
It took a bit of trial and error to see which versions of the different libraries and build tools work together.
[1]: https://github.com/dharple/detox
It suggested various things to try, and after pasting in the error messages each time it suggested more and more radical things. Eventually it suggested a program called Untrunc, where you give it a working video file as a reference and then the file that's faulty and as if by magic it worked!
Just wanted to mention this in case anyone else is struggling to get FFmpeg to repair a file.
I've started doing something similar on the command line with Claude Code that works incredibly well:
claude -p "use ffmpeg to convert myvideo.mov into an h264 video suitable for youtube upload" --dangerously-skip-permissions
Highly recommended! I use --dangerously-skip-permissions because I just want to set it and forget it and dont need to babysit the run.
FTR I don't, and have never used AI to write or do any "creative work", because it's not creativity if it doesn't come from you.