Comment by Culonavirus
Comment by Culonavirus a day ago
> incantation
FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering
Comment by Culonavirus a day ago
> incantation
FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering
Ffmpeg was designed to be unusable if it falls into enemy hands.
with gemini-cli and claude-cli you can now prompt while it prompts ffmpeg, and it does work.
Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.
Just seeking a clarification on how this would be done:
One would use gemini-cli (or claude-cli),
- and give a natural language prompt to gemini (or claude) on what processing needs to be done,
- with the correct paths to FFmpeg and the media file,
- and g-cli (or c-cli) would take it from there.
Is this correct?
Another option is to use a non-cli LLM and ask it to produce a script (bash/ps1) that uses ffmpeg to do X, Y, and Z to your video files. If using a chat LLM it will often provide suggestions or ask questions to improve your processing as well. I do this often and the results are quite good.
Curious to see how quickly each LLM picks up the new codecs/options.
Gemini can now load context from a URL in the API (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/url-context), but I'm not sure if that has made it to the web interfaces yet.
nope, that would be handling tar balls
ffmpeg right after
Tough crowd.
fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent
Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs.
If you want to create a tar, I'm sorry but you're on your own.
I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.
"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!
> tar xzf foobar.tgz
You don't need the z, as xf will detect which compression was used, if any.
Creating is no harder, just use c for create instead, and specify z for gzip compression:
tar czf archive.tar.gz [filename(s)]
tar tf archive.tar.gzPersonally I never understood the problem with tar balls.
The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.
That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.
Examples:
tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz
cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l
cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x
For anyone curious, unless you are running a 'tar' binary from the stone ages, just skip the gunzip and cat invocations. Replace .gz with .xz or other well known file ending for different compression.
Examples:
tar -cf archive.tar.gz foo bar # Create archive.tar.gz from files foo and bar.
tar -tvf archive.tar.gz # List all files in archive.tar.gz verbosely.
tar -xf archive.tar.gz # Extract all files from archive.tar.gz> tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.
Surely you mean -t if you wanna list, t for lisT.
l is for check-Links.
-l, --check-links
(c and r modes only) Issue a warning message unless all links to each file are archived.
> -l
Whoops, lol.
> on its own
Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.
That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.
What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?
I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.
The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.
I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.