Ffmpeg was designed to be unusable if it falls into enemy hands.

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.

It's funny because GPU stuff like what this article is about is where the LLMs totally fall apart. I can make any LLM produce volumes hallucinations at the drop of a hat by asking it how to construct ffmpeg commands that use hardware acceleration.

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.

Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.

I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out

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

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.gz

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.

Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.

Except it's tar -t to list, not -l

    gzip -dc backup.tar.gz | tar -x

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.

it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference

cpio is not that hard.

A common use case is:

  $ cpio -pdumv args 

  $ man cpio 

Copy

Cpio supports a third type of operation which copies files. It is initiated with the pass-through option flag (p). This mode combines the copy-out and copy-in steps without actually creating any file archive. In this mode, cpio reads path names on standard input like the copy-out operation, but instead of creating an archive, it recreates the directories and files at a different location in the file system, as specified by the path given as a command line argument.

This example copies the directory tree starting at the current directory to another path new-path in the file system, preserving files modification times (flag m), creating directories as needed (d), replacing any existing files unconditionally (u), while producing a progress listing on standard output (v):

$ find . -depth -print | cpio -p -dumv new-path