Re:Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
by qbow883 on Saturday December 27, 2025 @04:51PM
(#46405638)
Thank you, this explains my thoughts really well.
Re:Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
by CamperBob2 on Sunday December 28, 2025 @01:57PM
(#46413462)
Usually when AI hallucinates an option that doesn't exist, the option really should exist. So then I tell it to add it.
Then, several days later, I crawl away from fighting robots in a rabbit hole, and finally get around to doing what I set out to do in the first place....
In my opinion there are two kinds of users: 1. Users who use FFmpeg regularly enough to know/understand the parameters. 2. Users who only use FFmpeg once in a while to do something specific.
This wrapper is superfluous for users in group number 1. But group number 2 does not really get much out of it either, for the reasons you've mentioned.
As a member of group 2, I usually want to do something very specific (e.g. remove an audio track, convert only the video, remux to a different container, etc.). A simple English wrapper does not help me here because it is not powerful enough; the defaults are usually not what I want. What I need is a tool that will take a more detailed English statement of what I want to achieve and spit out the FFmpeg command with explanations for what each parameter does and how it achieves my goal. We have this today: AI; and it mostly works (once you've gone through several iterations of it hallucinating options that do not exist...).