One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.
Building ffmpeg itself from source is actually quite easy.
The hardest part IMO is getting the necessary codecs to work; this can take a little while. If you know what audio and video codecs you want and need, and if you get them installed properly, then compiling ffmpeg is really simple and straightforward. It works almost always for me, and I have compiled ffmpeg from source for like +10 or even +15 years.
For reference purposes, my current configure options are:
Probably more codecs could be added, and some options may not be necessary anymore (I changed this last ... years ago, too), but this works for the most part fairly well.
One focus I have is mostly on a few .mp4 files, and for these I think you kind of want x264 x265 and so forth (I think one more codec from google too or so). But it is really quite trivial once you are past the codecs step. You can also start simple with just a few codecs, e. g. one good audio codec and one good video codec. One reason I like to have ffmpeg support many codecs is so I can use mpv, which in itself is really awesome; I like it more than vlc, which is also ok though.
Isn't the point of JPEG to have lossy compression for your photos that still looks fine? As opposed to something like PNG, which has lossless compression
"JPEG" is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, an ISO/ITU group that creates a lot of imaging standards. The JPEG image format you're thinking of is only one of the formats they've created.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group manages many standards, generally each called "JPEG [something]". The one we most commonly call "JPEG" is just one of them.
Reading that it looks like the point of JPEG-XS is to have near-lossless compression for raw photo and video data while having extremely high throughput.
We use JXS when latency is critical. Most h24/265 decodes will have a 10 frame glass-glass delay, JXS drops that to 3 or 4, at a cost of bandwidth (our UHD jxs streams are 1.5gbit rather than 200mbit for hevc)
> gfxcapture: Windows.Graphics.Capture based window/monitor capture
> This source provides low overhead capture of application windows or entire monitors. The filter outputs hardware frames in d3d11 format; use hwdownload,format= if system memory frames are required.
This would strongly alter my plans if I were to develop an OSS Discord alternative. Chromium originally looked like a better core to start with largely due to its mature screen capture API. WebRTC is the other big thing, but there are other ways to do that. Native desktop apps (i.e., not browser based) are beginning to look much more compelling to me now.
FFmpeg is really great. The only wish I'd have is for the usage to become simpler - both for regular stuff, but also for advanced filtering.
If anyone remembers, avisynth was pretty cool back in the days. You could kind
of script video/audio manipulations, a bit like a UNIX/Linux pipe, but kind of
simpler, in my opinion. FFmpeg allows for many similar operations, but remembering
anything here is ... hard. I'd love for the whole usage API to become much simpler, but it seems nobody among the ffmpeg dev team is considering this. :(
I can't be the only one with that wish though ...
It does not diminish ffmpeg being so great in general, but I think it could be better.
One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.
Khronos published a post on the Vulkan compute codecs in FFmpeg: https://www.khronos.org/blog/video-encoding-and-decoding-wit...
Is there a 'HW' guide to show the expected performance of Vulkan compute codecs anywhere?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410271
> Oh there's a new version of ffmpeg, I'll just quickly build it from source... no I can't wait I'll download the binary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM
I tend to build ffmpeg from source because package managers don't usually include support for patented codecs.
(Yes I know there are repos to get binaries for some, things like deb-multimedia.)
Building ffmpeg itself from source is actually quite easy.
The hardest part IMO is getting the necessary codecs to work; this can take a little while. If you know what audio and video codecs you want and need, and if you get them installed properly, then compiling ffmpeg is really simple and straightforward. It works almost always for me, and I have compiled ffmpeg from source for like +10 or even +15 years.
For reference purposes, my current configure options are:
Probably more codecs could be added, and some options may not be necessary anymore (I changed this last ... years ago, too), but this works for the most part fairly well.One focus I have is mostly on a few .mp4 files, and for these I think you kind of want x264 x265 and so forth (I think one more codec from google too or so). But it is really quite trivial once you are past the codecs step. You can also start simple with just a few codecs, e. g. one good audio codec and one good video codec. One reason I like to have ffmpeg support many codecs is so I can use mpv, which in itself is really awesome; I like it more than vlc, which is also ok though.
Changelog:
ffprobe -codec option
EXIF Metadata Parsing
gfxcapture: Windows.Graphics.Capture based window/monitor capture
hxvs demuxer for HXVS/HXVT IP camera format
MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding via mpeghdec
D3D12 H.264 encoder
drawvg filter via libcairo
ffmpeg CLI tiled HEIF support
D3D12 AV1 encoder
ProRes Vulkan hwaccel
DPX Vulkan hwaccel
Rockchip H.264/HEVC hardware encoder
Add vf_scale_d3d12 filter
JPEG-XS parser
JPEG-XS decoder and encoder through libsvtjpegxs
JPEG-XS raw bitstream muxer and demuxer
IAMF Projection mode Ambisonic Audio Elements muxing and demuxing
Add vf_mestimate_d3d12 filter
xHE-AAC Mps212 decoding support (experimental)
Remove the old HLS protocol handler
Vulkan compute codec optimizations
swscale Vulkan support
LCEVC metadata bitstream filter
Add vf_deinterlace_d3d12 filter
ffprobe: only show refs field in stream section when reading frames
ProRes Vulkan encoder
LCEVC parser
LCEVC enhancement layer exporting in MPEG-TS
TIL: JPEG XS - an image and video codec that offers both visually and mathematically lossless quality for low latency implementations.
Additionally, JPEG XS compressed content is indistinguishable from the original uncompressed content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS
Isn't the point of JPEG to have lossy compression for your photos that still looks fine? As opposed to something like PNG, which has lossless compression
"JPEG" is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, an ISO/ITU group that creates a lot of imaging standards. The JPEG image format you're thinking of is only one of the formats they've created.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group manages many standards, generally each called "JPEG [something]". The one we most commonly call "JPEG" is just one of them.
Reading that it looks like the point of JPEG-XS is to have near-lossless compression for raw photo and video data while having extremely high throughput.
JPEG XS supports either near lossless or truly lossless encoding depending on encoder configuration.
> Additionally, JPEG XS compressed content is indistinguishable from the original uncompressed content.
It can be indistinguishable, as long as you stick with lossless or very low compression ratios. It falls apart at typical JPEG XL compression ratios.
We use JXS when latency is critical. Most h24/265 decodes will have a 10 frame glass-glass delay, JXS drops that to 3 or 4, at a cost of bandwidth (our UHD jxs streams are 1.5gbit rather than 200mbit for hevc)
> gfxcapture: Windows.Graphics.Capture based window/monitor capture
> This source provides low overhead capture of application windows or entire monitors. The filter outputs hardware frames in d3d11 format; use hwdownload,format= if system memory frames are required.
This would strongly alter my plans if I were to develop an OSS Discord alternative. Chromium originally looked like a better core to start with largely due to its mature screen capture API. WebRTC is the other big thing, but there are other ways to do that. Native desktop apps (i.e., not browser based) are beginning to look much more compelling to me now.
If you were doing this, consider cribbing from https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins... which offers a variety of solutions including some rather exciting looking process injection (called "game" there).
I wonder if "entire chat app functions as OBS plugin" would work? Would solve the AV streaming side of the functionality.
You could always use Windows.Graphics.Capture directly.
FFmpeg is really great. The only wish I'd have is for the usage to become simpler - both for regular stuff, but also for advanced filtering.
If anyone remembers, avisynth was pretty cool back in the days. You could kind of script video/audio manipulations, a bit like a UNIX/Linux pipe, but kind of simpler, in my opinion. FFmpeg allows for many similar operations, but remembering anything here is ... hard. I'd love for the whole usage API to become much simpler, but it seems nobody among the ffmpeg dev team is considering this. :(
I can't be the only one with that wish though ...
It does not diminish ffmpeg being so great in general, but I think it could be better.
If you're just looking for an easier solution for encoding video ("regular stuff") then Handbrake is the go-to tool for that.
One of the best uses of LLMs is to help find the right command line options for tools like ffmpeg.
I wouldn't get too excited about rockchip hw encoding. It's rkmpp based, not an upstream solution. You'd need Rockchip kernel for this, I guess.
It's still a big deal, you had to compile ffmpeg yourself before
How much of this release was done by to corporate/big tech employees?
I have no idea how much they contribute back, but pretty much every (big) tech company that does any media transcoding uses ffmpeg.
nice job