Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast" video.

  1. A lot of tools use FFmpeg behind the scenes, without you realizing it.
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  2. One note is that if you download a prebuilt binary, you can never (legally) get the full functionality of FFmpeg. This is because the build options include both “-enable-nonfree” and “-enable-gpl”, and if you specify both, you end with a build that says its licence is “unredistributable”. But at least you have that choice if you build it yourself.
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  3. Python is a good tool for building wrappers. I did a job a few months ago involving extracting telemetry data from videos recorded on GoPro cameras. Yes, did you know there are extra data streams on those videos, besides the regular video and audio? Besides the ffmpeg command itself, the suite also includes ffprobe, which lets you analyze a video file and determine the locations and timestamps of every packet in every stream. Once I had this, decoding the data was quite easy (barring discrepancies between documented formats and the actual data generated by different camera models ... c’est la vie ...).
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  4. One common reason I’ve found for videos failing to play on other platforms is that the pix_fmt defaults to yuv444p, which is unnecessarily high quality. Change this to yuv422p or even yuv420p, and most decoders should be fine.
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  5. I always render individual image frames out of Blender. Then I can experiment with different encoding options (fast), without having to re-render (slow).
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  6. ProRes uses DCT compression, just like JPEG. Why not use wavelet-based compression instead?
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  7. A lot of tools use FFmpeg behind the scenes, without you realizing it.
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  8. You use it on Windows!? Poor you.
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  9. The legendary Fabrice Bellard started the project, though I’m not sure he’s still involved with it.
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  10. On Linux!
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  11. When you build it, you get man pages as well.
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  12.  @keith3761  It’s all described in the GoPro docs.
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  13. I had to hunt around, but you get that info (and a lot more besides) with “ffmpeg -help full”.
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  14. Use Linux ... or stay on Microsoft and complain.
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