What a fantastic project. It’s FOSS like this that makes the world go round. If only the original vision of the internet had been fulfilled, we’d have hundreds more projects like it.
There are hundreds more projects like it. Projects like GIMP, ImageMagick, Apache, curl, GCC, LLVM, Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE, Linux, the BSDs, etc., etc.
There are many massively useful things available as free and open source software.
Definitely not. It certainly no longer belongs in "the original vision of the internet" category. Not when it wants to be a part of evil forces seeking to police the internet.
I initially did not want to bring this up, but Firefox literally changed my default search engine from DuckDuckGo to Google after I updated it yesterday.
No opt-in, no user input, no warning, no nothing. Just shoved Google down the user's throat.
I don't think that was due to Mozilla pushing Google. I have Firefox configured with DuckDuckGo on all my devices and this has never happened to me on an update.
And blocking all extensions by default on Firefox mobile.... At least you can create an add-on collection to bring them back but Mozilla is evil nowadays.
ffmpeg is absolutely wonderful, but some combination of its originating era, long history, and compatibility commitments (how many convoluted production ffmpeg scripts exist out in nature?) have made its CLI pretty rough.
This is maybe "known" to the current audience, but chatGPT is an excellent soundboard for crafting ffmpeg scripts to do pretty much anything - makes the tool about 10 times as accessible to me.
A lot of that is essential complexity of the problem space - media is HARD: so many different specs, each one interpreted differently by each vendor.
In case you're not aware, though, there has been work on improving the CLI - it was discussed on HN[1] earlier this week, and there's an excellent video[2] linked in that thread with an overview from Anton
You may be right about essential vs accidental complexity - my domain knowledge is too weak to have an opinion - I just get the subjective impression of "holy crap this makes git feel like my mother tongue".
I can't speak to the CLI, but the C API is pretty stable in my experience. I just upgraded my ffmpeg dependency from a really old version to 6.1 with zero issues (except a few benign deprecated warnings)
Are there any good ts/js wrappers for this that make producing animations and transitions a bit easier? I find the cli args syntax hard to work with.
Like pythons moviePy
Will the vaapi av1 encoder work (well) with Intel Arc? I was trying to build ffmpeg cartwheel and was up until sunrise because I had to build some other dependency of another dependency. Meanwhile the vaapi h264 (or was it 265?) encoder played quite nice with my rdna2 card.
