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US banks lobby regulators for national standards to curb state influence

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-banks-lobby-regulators-national-standards-curb-state-influence-sources-say-2025-08-22/
1•petethomas•51s ago•0 comments

Math Not Required (2023)

https://programmersstone.blog/posts/math-not-required/
1•zdw•1m ago•0 comments

AI Helps UK Woman Rediscover Lost Voice After 25 Years

https://www.barrons.com/news/ai-helps-uk-woman-rediscover-lost-voice-after-25-years-32c93bda
1•speckx•2m ago•0 comments

Criminal background checker APCS faces data breach

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/22/apcs_breach/
1•rntn•2m ago•0 comments

Why Publishers Care More About AI 'Grounding' Than Training Deals

https://digiday.com/media/wtf-is-ai-grounding-licensing-and-why-do-publishers-say-it-matters-over-training-deals/
1•petethomas•3m ago•0 comments

Designer – Generate UI with one prompt for free on an infinite canvas

https://designer.tesslate.com
1•u-mesh•5m ago•0 comments

Jokes on You, We All Use Juicero Now

https://idiallo.com/blog/we-all-use-juicero-now
2•foxfired•5m ago•0 comments

Cursor charges me $10.67 for a single sonnet call, a mod on X removed my post

https://old.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1mwyyp9/cursor_charges_me_1067_for_a_single_sonnet_call_a
1•AgentMatrixAI•6m ago•0 comments

WDC's unreleased W65C832 (32-bit 6502) CPU implemented in an FPGA

https://github.com/mikeakohn/w65c832
2•lproven•9m ago•0 comments

TikTok to layoff hundreds of UK content reviewers for AI

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgjyp48dp21o
2•kenjackson•10m ago•0 comments

The dangers of the JDBC bottleneck in Trino

https://www.starburst.io/blog/jdbc-trino-starburst/
1•abadid•10m ago•1 comments

Texas Instruments' $60B U.S. project, the next iPhone chips fabric

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/apple-will-make-chips-at-texas-instruments-60-billion-us-project.html
1•giuliomagnifico•10m ago•0 comments

A Cheeky Pint with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeVny5KHj4g
1•dgs_sgd•11m ago•0 comments

Non-Consensual Technology

https://blog.erlend.sh/non-consensual-technology
1•erlend_sh•12m ago•0 comments

Artificial light has essentially lengthened birds' day

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/21/nx-s1-5507165/light-pollution-bird-day-hour-longer
2•speckx•12m ago•0 comments

CFPB: Personal Financial Data Rights Reconsideration

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/22/2025-16139/personal-financial-data-rights-reconsideration
1•impish9208•13m ago•0 comments

Project Orchestration Agents

https://substack.com/inbox/post/171603038
1•mathattack•15m ago•0 comments

The Oak Architecture: A Vision of SuperIntelligence from Experience, Rich Sutton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEbbGyNkR2U
1•wavelander•16m ago•0 comments

Textplot DuckDB Extension

https://query.farm/duckdb_extension_textplot.html
1•kermatt•17m ago•0 comments

Embedding Wren in Hare

https://drewdevault.com/2025/08/20/2025-08-20-Hare-and-Wren.html
2•als0•20m ago•1 comments

Show HN: AI Fantasy Football Analyst

https://sourcetable.com/fantasy-football
1•mceoin•20m ago•0 comments

Nvidia CUDA Toolkit 13.0 Is Out

https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-13-0-is-out/
1•PaulHoule•22m ago•0 comments

Was It Something I Said?

https://www.thirdway.org/memo/was-it-something-i-said
1•EvgeniyZh•22m ago•0 comments

Waymo granted first permit to begin testing autonomous vehicles in New York City

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo-permit-new-york-city-nyc-rides.html
20•achristmascarl•23m ago•0 comments

RAG is solving the wrong problem

https://contextlite.com/downloads
1•MKuykendall•24m ago•1 comments

The London Bridge Effect

https://vp.net/l/en-US/blog/The-London-Bridge-Effect
1•rasengan•25m ago•0 comments

Bubbletea-rs: a Rust implementation of Bubbletea

https://github.com/whit3rabbit/bubbletea-rs
2•jasonjmcghee•25m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join

3•gavino•25m ago•0 comments

Ergonomic errors in Rust: write fast, debug with ease, handle precisely

https://gmcgoldr.github.io/2025/08/21/stackerror.html
1•garrinm•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Focalist – Simple Web-Based Task Manager for Daily Focus

https://www.focalist.app/
1•martin_hell•29m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

FFmpeg 8.0

https://ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8.0
292•gyan•2h ago

Comments

oblio•1h ago
First of all: congratulations!!!

Secondly, just curious: any insiders here?

What changed? I see the infrastructure has been upgraded, this seems like a big release, etc. I guess there was a recent influx of contributors? A corporate donation? Something else?

exprez135•1h ago
Not an insider, but I noticed that there is now a filter for using Whisper (C++) for audio transcription [1]. It looks like you provide the path to a model file [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp

[2]: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/13ce36fef98a...

ukuina•1h ago
This is big news if it means realtime subtitle generation.
ranger_danger•1h ago
in my experience whisper (at least on my 3070 Ti) is not capable of high quality real-time transcription. A few seconds per second of audio, maybe.
perihelions•1h ago
You missed out on the thread!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647 ("FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support (ffmpeg.org)"—9 days ago, 331 comments)

pmarreck•1h ago
Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool.

I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)

Culonavirus•1h ago
> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

Keyframe•1h ago
with gemini-cli and claude-cli you can now prompt while it prompts ffmpeg, and it does work.
NSUserDefaults•1h ago
Curious to see how quickly each LLM picks up the new codecs/options.
baq•1h ago
the canonical (if that's the right word for a 2-year-old technique) solution is to paste the whole manual into the context before asking questions
xnx•10m ago
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.
stevejb•1h ago
I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out
conradev•1h ago
Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!
turnsout•32m ago
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.
profsummergig•28m ago
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?

RedShift1•13m ago
Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.
profsummergig•10m ago
Thank you.
jeanlucas•1h ago
nope, that would be handling tar balls

ffmpeg right after

porridgeraisin•1h ago
Personally 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
You never need anything else for the 99% case.
drivers99•1h ago
Except it's tar -t to list, not -l
porridgeraisin•1h ago
Whoops, lol. Well that's unfortunate.
sdfsdfgsdgg•1h ago
> 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.
And you don't need to uncompress separately. tar will detect the correct compression algorithm and decompress on its own. No need for that gunzip intermediate step.
porridgeraisin•1h ago
> -l

Whoops, lol.

> on its own

Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.

sdfsdfgsdgg•1h ago
That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.
bigstrat2003•1h ago
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.
encom•1h ago
It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?
mrguyorama•26m ago
As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?

Principle of least surprise and all that.

tombert•1h ago
Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.
aidenn0•1h ago
You for got the -z (or -a with a recent gnutar).
adastra22•1h ago
It’s no longer needed. You can leave it out and it auto-detects the file format.
CamperBob2•41m ago
What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips -- 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.

diggernet•12m ago
A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.

Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...

Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.

fullstop•8m ago
zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.
diggernet•3m ago
Good point. And if I remember right, tar allows longer paths than zip.
jeanlucas•1h ago
it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference

BeepInABox•44m ago
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
sho_hn•1h ago
nope, it's using `find`.
beala•44m ago
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.

fullstop•9m ago
I have so much of tar memorized. cpio is super funky to me, though.
mrandish•50m ago
I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.
RedShift1•24m ago
I'm ok with regex, but the ffmpeg manpage, it scares me...
jjcm•1h ago
LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. There are tons of tools out there that can help you run it with natural language. Here's my personal script: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg
agys•1h ago
LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

Barrin92•56m ago
it can work but it's far from science fiction. LLMs tend to produce extremely subpar if not buggy ffmpeg code. They'll routinely do things like put the file parameter before the start time which needlessly decodes the entire video, produce wrong bitrates, re-encode audio needlessly, and so on.

If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.

xandrius•55m ago
Had to do exactly that with a bunch of screenshots I took but happened to include a bunch of unnecessary parts of the screen.

A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.

The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.

0xbeefcab•1h ago
Linking a previous discussion to FFMPEG's inclusion of whisper in this release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647

This seemed to be interesting to users of this site. tl;dr they added support for whisper, an OpenAI model for speech-to-text, which should allow autogeneration of captions via ffmpeg

Culonavirus•1h ago
these days most movies and series already come out with captions, but you know what does not, given the vast amount of it?... ;)

yep, finally the deaf will able to read what people are saying in a porno!

0xbeefcab•1h ago
True, but also it can be hard to find captions in languages besides english for some lesser known movies/shows
yieldcrv•54m ago
And also pirated releases are super weird and all over the place with subtitles and video player compatibility

This could streamline things

bachittle•31m ago
Heads up: Whisper support depends on how your FFmpeg was built. Some packages will not include it yet. Check with `ffmpeg -buildconf` or `ffmpeg -filters | grep whisper`. If you compile yourself, remember to pass `--enable-whisper` and give the filter a real model path.
JadoJodo•1h ago
I don't know a huge amount about video encoding, but I presume this is one of those libraries outlined in xkcd 2347[0]?

[0] - https://xkcd.com/2347/

zhengyi13•1h ago
Yes, this is a pretty fundamental building block; just not so rickety.
0xbeefcab•1h ago
Yeah, basically anytime a video or audio is being recorded, played, or streamed its from ffmpeg. It runs on a couple planets [0], and on most devices (maybe?)

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

neckro23•1h ago
Not necessarily. A lot of video software either leverages the Windows/MacOS system codecs (ex. Media Player Classic, Quicktime) or proprietary vendor codecs (Adobe/Blackmagic).

Linux doesn't really have a system codec API though so any Linux video software you see (ex. VLC, Handbrake) is almost certainly using ffmpeg under the hood (or its foundation, libavcodec).

deaddodo•1h ago
FFMpeg is definitely fairly ubiquitous, but you are overstating its universality quite a bit. There are alternatives that utilize Windows/macOS's native media frameworks, proprietary software that utilizes bespoke frameworks, and libraries that function independently of ffmpeg that offer similar functionality.

That being said, if you put down a pie chart of media frameworks (especially for transcoding or muxing), ffmpeg would have a significant share of that pie.

aidenn0•1h ago
Pretty much.

It also was originally authored by the same person who did lzexe, tcc, qemu, and the current leader for the large text compression benchmark.

Oh, and for most of the 2010's there was a fork due to interpersonal issues on the team.

tombert•50m ago
Yeah I think pretty much everything that involves video on Linux or FreeBSD in 2025 involves FFmpeg or Gstreamer, usually the former.

It’s exceedingly good software though, and to be fair I think it’s gotten a fair bit of sponsorship and corporate support.

joshuat•1h ago
Some Netflix devs are going to have a busy sprint
elektor•1h ago
For those out of the loop, can you please explain your comment?
henryfjordan•1h ago
Netflix uses FFMPEG, will have to update
jeanlucas•1h ago
cheers for one more release, hope it gets attention and necessary funding
brcmthrowaway•1h ago
How much ARM acceleration vs x8664?
ekianjo•1h ago
Vulkan based encoders and decoders are super exciting!
larodi•1h ago
Is anyone else on the opinion that ffmpeg now ranks 4th as the most used lib after ssl, zlib, and sqlite... given video is like omnipresent in 2025?
pledg•1h ago
libcurl?
encom•58m ago
libc :D
npteljes•41m ago
It's up there in the hall of fame, that's for sure!
zaik•26m ago
You can check, at least for Arch Linux: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages
xnx•1h ago
Changelog: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/Changelog
y_sellami•1h ago
about time vulkan got into the game.
qmr•1h ago
Exciting news.

https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=b_vzB4o87ArcYNfq

outside1234•1h ago
Is this satire, serious, or both. :)
oldgregg•1h ago
LLMs have really made ffmpeg implementations easy-- the command line options are so expansive and obscure it's so nice to just tell it what you want and have it spit out a crazy ffmpeg command.
instagraham•40m ago
I remember saving my incantation to download and convert a youtube playlist (in the form of a txt file with a list of URLs) and this being the only way to back up Chrome music bookmark folders.

Then it stopped working until I updated youtube-dl and then that stopped working once I lost the incantation :<

noman-land•15m ago
Check out yt-dlp. It works great.
Dwedit•1h ago
Has anyone made a good GUI frontend for accessing the various features of FFMPEG? Sometimes you just want to remux a video without doing any transcoding, or join several video and audio streams together (same codecs).
joenot443•1h ago
Handbrake fits the bill, I think!

It's a great tool. Little long in the tooth these days, but gets the job done.

selectodude•39m ago
Handbrake receives pretty regular updates.
kevinsync•37m ago
Seconded, HandBrake[0] is great for routine tasks / workflows. The UI could be simplified just a tad for super duper simple stuff (ex. ripping a multi-episode tv show disc but don't care about disc extras? you kind of have to hunt and poke based on stream length to decide which parts are the actual episodes. The app itself could probably reliably guess and present you with a 1-click 'queue these up' flow for instance) but otherwise really a wonderful tool!

Past that, I'm on the command line haha

[0] https://handbrake.fr

pseudosavant•1h ago
I haven't used a GUI I like, but LLMs like ChatGPT have been so good for solving this for me. I tell it exactly what I need it to do and it produces the ffmpeg command to do it.
ricardojoaoreis•1h ago
You can use mkvtoolnix for that and it has a GUI
patapong•1h ago
I have found the best front-end to be ChatGPT. It is very good at figuring out the commands needed to accomplish something in FFmpeg, from my natural description of what I want to do.
AlienRobot•40m ago
It would need to be a non-linear editor node-based editor. Pretty much all open source video editors are just FFMPEG frontends, e.g. Kdenlive.
jazzyjackson•34m ago
check out https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
mrguyorama•23m ago
Shotcut is an open source Video production toolkit that is basically just a really nice interface for generating ffmpeg commands.

https://www.shotcut.org/

TiredOfLife•22m ago
ChatGPT and other llms
cubefox•13m ago
Pretty sure ChatGPT counts as a CLI, not as a GUI.
josteink•1h ago
Nice! Anyone have any idea how and when this will affect downstream projects like yt-dlp, jellyfin, etc? Especially with regard to support for HW-acceleration?
fleabitdev•33m ago
Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders. The only video codecs widely supported in hardware are H.264, H.265 and AV1, so cross-platform acceleration for other codecs will be very nice to have, even if it's less efficient than fixed-function hardware. The new ProRes encoder already looks useful for a project I'm working on.

> Only codecs specifically designed for parallelised decoding can be implemented in such a way, with more mainstream codecs not being planned for support.

It makes sense that most video codecs aren't amenable to compute shader decoding. You need tens of thousands of threads to keep a GPU busy, and you'll struggle to get that much parallelism when you have data dependencies between frames and between tiles in the same frame.

I wonder whether encoders might have more flexibility than decoders. Using compute shaders to encode something like VP9 (https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/12/13/overview-of-the-v...) would be an interesting challenge.

mtillman•29m ago
Exciting! I am consistently blown away by the talent of the ffmpeg maintainers. This is fairly hard stuff in my opinion and they do it for free.
ok123456•20m ago
Finally! RealVideo 6 support.
waihtis•14m ago
T3.gg in shambles
zzzeek•9m ago
ffmpeg is a treasure to the open source and audio technology communities. The tool cuts right through all kinds of proprietary and arcane roadblocks presented by various codecs and formats and it's clear a tremendous amount of work goes into keeping it all working. The CLI is of course quite opaque and the documentation for various features is often terse, but it's still the only tool on any platform anywhere that will always get you what you need for video and audio processing without ever running up against some kind of commercial paywall.