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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.

Comments

orderone_ai•10h ago

This is such a convenient tool for a casual user, and a great application of an LLM to a narrow task that probably couldn't be handled quite so easily everywhere. Also a great example of the emerging 'chat driven' UX trend, which I'm really liking.

madeofpalk•1h ago

I think it's amusing how the most consistent usecase for "LLM for CLI" is to use ffmpeg.

yakattak•9h ago

Honestly what a great application of LLMs. FFmpeg is a very powerful tool, and as with most powerful tools is very complicated to run correctly. Do the files get uploaded though? Or does it just grab the location on disk?

26d0•9h ago

This appears to use ffmpeg.wasm

danielvaughn•9h ago

I tried to implement something very similar recently, and had the hardest time getting the LLM to produce anything remotely resembling actual ffmpeg commands.

cchance•9h ago

load up the man pages into the context maybe?

ilaksh•9h ago

You were using a weak LLM then. The difference between one of the leading edge LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3, or Claude 4 and an average LLM or one you can run on your typical PC/laptop is night and day.

jeanlucas•8h ago

for real? to me it works fine with just chatGPT (free)

toddmorey•9h ago

The Warp terminal[1] is excellent for this type of thing. In agent mode, you just describe what you want to have happen and it generates the proper command(s) (that you can approve before running).

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

jjcm•8h ago

Great work on this - I made a terminal command similar to this (llmpeg), and was actively trying to get exactly this working - a webasm compiled version of ffmpeg that could encode in the browser. I for the life of me couldn't get the provided examples on https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm to run.

Just for my own development curiosity, was there anything specific you had to do to get ffmpegwasm to work?

nzoschke•8h ago

I don’t know about the browser but I’ve been playing with a WASM build through this Go wrapper. Nice to not need CGO.

https://codeberg.org/gruf/go-ffmpreg

zahlman•6h ago

I'm a little confused as to how someone makes an "mpreg" joke in the project name, but censors "lame" in the README.

aspenmayer•4h ago

Lame could be considered an ableist slur, I guess?

iamflimflam1•8h ago

I had the same problem - would love to see a working example.

dheera•7h ago

I made a script of this sort too originally called "ffmpeg-english" last year. Interesting how people reacted to it:

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:

    $ helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps

bsenftner•8h ago

I think you need to add some liberal filename handling. I have directories of videos generated by various AI video models, and they have spaces in the filenames, not just one, but the prompt to generate the video plus the major parameters are all the filename. They are long, pains in the ass to work with, but they are there. Would be nice if your tool could work with them.

pdyc•8h ago

interesting, i created a video editor to generate ffmpeg commands because it was difficult to adjust ffmpeg commands on commandline https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/ . This lets you tweak ffmpeg commands visually.

somesun•5h ago

a similar website https://ffmpeg.app/

p0w3n3d•5h ago

  I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I cannot do that

runeks•2h ago

How do you know my name?!

jjbinx007•4h ago

I recently used Gemini to help with some dashcam videos that weren't being saved properly. I was sure most of the data were there but the files wouldn't play in VLC or MPC, so I asked Gemini.

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.

pjc50•3h ago

Interesting - I took a look at how this works and why it needs a reference, and the answer is the usual one of the 'moov atom': a critical piece of metadata. Lots of programs output it at the end of the file, but that makes it vulnerable to truncation, and for streaming it's useful to move it to the beginning of the file. ffmpeg refers to this as "fast start".

raincole•2h ago

That's great. How could it work in browser? Is it a webassembly implementation of FFmpeg?

baobabKoodaa•2h ago

This is a perfect use case for thin LLM wrappers!

kkukshtel•2h ago

To yes, and this —

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.