Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser

Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser(vidmix.app)

179 points by bjano 312 days ago | 46 comments

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.

jjbinx007 308 days 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 308 days 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".

jjbinx007 308 days ago | | |

That makes sense, thanks for that

kkukshtel 308 days 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.

blueboo 308 days ago | |

`llm cmd` by simonw is even better for one-off commands. It spits out the invocation and you can repurpose as suits your needs. Thanks Simon!

4m1rk 307 days ago | | |

simonw's llm is amazing. Basically disappointed me for trying to build any LLM powered cli tool

teddyh 308 days ago | |

Em-dash alert.

fao_ 308 days ago | | |

Not OP, but the whole "AI using em-dashes when people writing would use commas" is very annoying given that the em-dash is readily available on my phone (hold on - to get one) and on my computer (compose - -), and I only started using it because people pointed out that commas are incorrect in this instance :(

FTR I don't, and have never used AI to write or do any "creative work", because it's not creativity if it doesn't come from you.

smitelli 308 days ago | | |

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

jjcm 308 days 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?

dheera 308 days 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

bjano 308 days ago | |

The creator of that repo has a blog with some posts on building a wasm version of FFmpeg, I mostly followed those: https://jeromewus.medium.com/ I also used some of their scripts for building the 3rd-party libraries.

It took a bit of trial and error to see which versions of the different libraries and build tools work together.

iamflimflam1 308 days ago | |

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

nzoschke 308 days 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 308 days ago | | |

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

toddmorey 308 days 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

WesleyLivesay 308 days ago | |

I was going to mention Warp here as well. It is fantastic when it comes to almost anything in the terminal. It has caused me to use the terminal a lot more on all of my computers because I don't have to spend a bunch of time poking around on Google to find the command to run.

I have used it for ffmpeg and then a lot of other slightly more complex commands. A recent one from the other day was gathering up all of the .epub documents in a directory tree, renaming them to the name of the directory they were in, and then placing them all in one single directory. That would have been a whole project for me, and Warp gave me the command with just that description. Any LLM interface would have done the same, but Warp just let me hit "Enter" and run it, no need to copy and paste.

d4rkp4ttern 308 days ago | |

Also in zed you can hit ctl-enter in terminal or in code and get the same

aitchnyu 308 days ago | | |

IME as a dev, I got value from Aider using AI as a commodity to edit code. The sparkly buttons in AWS Cloudwatch log queries, Mongo Compass desktop app and other apps with AI features are hit or miss so far.

orderone_ai 308 days 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 308 days ago | |

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

adamgusky 308 days ago |

Anyone that has built something with FFmpeg understands why this is at the top of HN.

danielvaughn 308 days 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.

ilaksh 308 days 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.

victorbjorklund 308 days ago | |

Which model did you use? Claude has been spot on for all my needs.

cchance 308 days ago | |

load up the man pages into the context maybe?

jeanlucas 308 days ago | |

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

bsenftner 308 days 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.

jbaber 307 days ago | |

I haven't needed it in a while, but I remember detox[1] being good for bulk renaming without me having to provide input.

[1]: https://github.com/dharple/detox

alalonde 307 days ago |

Nice! Reminds me of the ooo-wow early LLM days where those little explain-Regexps one-off sites were popping up everywhere. Seems inevitable that the LLMs will slurp up this functionality natively as well

matcha-video 308 days ago |

Love this! Folks here should also check out https://wide.video if they're looking for a VERY full featured free in-browser video editor

pdyc 308 days 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 308 days ago |

a similar website https://ffmpeg.app/

guluarte 308 days ago |

I also recommend djcopley/ShellOracle if you are lazy like me and never remember the commands.

raincole 308 days ago |

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

p0w3n3d 308 days ago |

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

runeks 308 days ago | |

How do you know my name?!

p0w3n3d 307 days ago | | |

It's been sent in the tracking cookie

baobabKoodaa 308 days ago |

This is a perfect use case for thin LLM wrappers!

yakattak 308 days 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?

bjano 308 days ago | |

Nothing is uploaded, everything runs locally.

26d0 308 days ago | |

This appears to use ffmpeg.wasm

ale42 308 days ago | | |

Therefore you lose any hardware acceleration I guess? I'd prefer to run an actual native ffmpeg on my machine, but of course then there's the security issue of copy-pasting a command line of "unknown" origin...