A version of this comment is posted in all submissions about Low Rank Adapters. I don't see how "Learning to reason in 13 parameters" would apply to low power radio communication, so it's even less relevant this time.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The cropdetect example made me wonder if they're thinking about including support for yolo or similar models. They're including Whisper for text to speech already, I think yolo would enable things like automatic face censoring and general frame content aware editing. Or maybe Segment anything, and have more fine grained masks available.
On the other hand, when I compared the binaries (ffmpeg, ffprobe, ffplay) I downloaded the other day with the ones I had installed since around September, they where almost 100 MB larger. I don't remember the exact size of the old ones but the new ones are 640 MB, the old ones well under 600 MB. The only difference in included libraries was Cairo and the JPEG-XS lib. So while I think a bunch of new ML models would be really cool, maybe they don't want to go down that route. But some kind of pluggable system with accelerated ML models would be helpful I think.
I don't find trimming videos with ffmpeg particularly difficult, is just-ss xx -to xx -c copy basically. Sure, you need to get those time stamps using a media player, but you probably already have one so that isn't really an issue.
What I've found to be trickier is dividing a video into multiple clips, where one clip can start at the end of another, but not necessarily.
Missed opportunity to reference the famous Dropbox hn comment.
I just think there are other closely related use cases where a separate program can add more value, especially in the terminal. I wouldn't suggest most people should use ffmpeg instead of a gui, those are too dissimilar. Another example is cutting out a part of a video, with ffmpeg you need to make two temporary videos and then concatenate them, that process would greatly benefit from a better ux.
Point of order: the Dropbox HN comment is famously misconstrued. People think it was about Dropbox; it was about the Dropbox YC application, and was both well-intentioned and constructive.
# make a 6 second long video that alternates from green to red every second.
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "color=red[a];color=green[b];[a][b]overlay='mod(floor(t)\,2)*w'" -t 6 master.mp4; # creates 150 frames @ 25fps.
# try make a 1 second clip starting at 0sec. it should be all green.
ffmpeg -ss 0 -i "master.mp4" -t 1 -c copy "clip1.mp4"; # exports 27 frames. you see some red.
ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 1 -i "master.mp4" -c copy "clip2.mp4"; # exports 27 frames. you see some red.
ffmpeg -ss 0 -to 1 -i "master.mp4" -c copy "clip3.mp4"; # exports 27 frames. you see some red.
# -t and -to stop after the limit, so subtract a frame. but that leaves 26...
# so perhaps offset the start time so that frame#0 is at 0.04 (ie, list starts at 1)?
ffmpeg -itsoffset 0.04 -ss 0 -i "master.mp4" -t 0.96 -c copy "clip4.mp4"; # exports 25 frames, all green, time = 1.00. success.
# try make another 1 second clip starting at 2sec. it should be all green.
ffmpeg -itsoffset 0.04 -ss 2 -i "master.mp4" -t 0.96 -c copy "clip5.mp4"; # exports 75 frames, time = 1.08, and you see red-green-red.
# maybe don't offset the start, and drop 2 at the end?
ffmpeg -ss 2 -i "master.mp4" -t 0.92 -c copy "clip6.mp4"; # exports 75 frames, time = 1.08, and you see green-red.
ffmpeg -ss 2 -t 0.92 -i "master.mp4" -c copy "clip7.mp4"; # exports 75 frames, time = 0.92, and you see green-red.
# try something different...
ffmpeg -ss 2 -i "master.mp4" -c copy -frames 25 "clip8.mp4"; # video is broken.
ffmpeg -ss 2 -i "master.mp4" -c copy -frames 25 -avoid_negative_ts make_zero "clip9.mp4"; # exports 25 frames, all green, time = 1.00. success?
# try export a red video the same way.
ffmpeg -ss 3 -i "master.mp4" -c copy -frames 25 -avoid_negative_ts make_zero "clip10.mp4"; # oh no, it's all green!
I've never tried doing frame perfect clips like that, that does sound annoying. But from a cursory read of the source, I don't think this program will solve that issue either? Because the time stamps in your examples are all correct, and the TUI is using ffmpeg with -ss and -t as well.
I think the best way of getting frame accurate clips like that is putting the starting time after the input (or rather before the output), which decodes the video up to that time, and reencode it instead of copying. Both of these commands gives the expected output:
Yer, I noticed that this tool was just doing `-ss -i -t` from its demo gif, which is what prompted me to reply. I'm sure people will discover that all sorts of problems will manifest if they don't start a lossless clip on a keyframe. One such scenario is when you make a clip that plays perfect on your PC, but then you send it someone over FB Messenger, and all of a sudden there's a few seconds of extra video at the start!
Can't make frame perfect cuts without re-encoding, unless your cut points just so happen to be keyframe aligned.
There are incantations that can dump for you metadata about the individual packets a given video stream is made up of, ordered by timecode. That way you can sanity check things.
This is terribly frustrating. The paths of least resistance either lead to improper cuts or wasteful re-encoding. Re-encoding just until the nearest keyframe I'm sure is also possible, but yeah, this does suck, and the tool above doesn't seem to make this any more accessible either according to the sibling comment.
> Re-encoding just until the nearest keyframe I'm sure is also possible
Yer, I've done that, and it's a pain to do "manually" (ie, without having a script ready to do it for you). I've also manually sliced the bitstream to re-insert the keyframe, which if applied to my clip5.mp4 example, could potentially reduce the 50* negative ts frames to maybe 2 or 3. It would be easier if there were tools that could "unpack" and "repack" the frames within the bitstream, and allow you to modify "pointers"/etc in the process - but I don't know of any such thing.
For frame perfect cuts you need to re-encode. You can use lossless H264 encoding for intermediary cuts before the final one so that you don't unnecessarily degrade quality.
I wonder if there is a solution which would just copy the pieces in between the starting and ending points while only re-encoding the first and last piece as required.
I've been trying to cut precise clips from a long mp4 video over the past week or so and learned a lot. I started with ffmpeg on the command line but between getting accurate timestamps and keyframe/encoding issues it is not trivial. For my needs I want a very precise starting frame and best results came from first reencoding at much higher quality, then marking & batching with LossLessCut, then down coding my clips to desired quality. Even then there's still some manual review and touch-up.
It's not crazy-hard, but by no means trivial or simple.
I used a plugin in mpv to do it but I can't find it anymore. You just pressed a key to mark the start and end. And with . and , you could do it at keyframe resolution not just seconds.
Appreciate you mentioning the MPV route for making clips, I might actually go through and process all the game recordings I saved for clips over the years.
Both Russia and Ukraine build millions of drones per year, most of them fpv drones that are basically remote controlled flying grenades. There's plenty of electronic warfare with radio jamming, so in some places they use drone mounted spools of fiber optic cable to control them. It's probably been the most impactful weapon type in the war for the past years.
Claude Code built a TUI for me last night, in this case to step through nanosecond timestamped ITCH market data messages and rebuild an order book visual in the terminal. This type of stuff would have taken a day - but done in 5 minutes now.
> If this attribute is present, the browser will offer controls to allow the user to control video playback, including volume, seeking, and pause/resume playback.
Edit: I misunderstood, you are asking
> how they'd managed to hide the video context menu
Its entirely possible I did something to it accidentally that made the context menu not work properly. I had the dev tools open to pull the actual video address when I right clicked, so I might have messed something up. Or maybe the devs are secretly looking at the comments and fixed it between me and you trying :P
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
reply