FFmpeg 8.0

Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!

If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].

In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.

[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan

[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...

Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:

    Video2X-x86_64.AppImage -i "$f" \
     -c libvpx-vp9 -e crf=34 -o "${f/480p/480p_upscale2x}" \
     -p realcugan -s 2 --noise-level 1

To find the best arguments for upscaling (last line from above), I first used ffmpeg to extract a short scene that I encoded with various parameter sets. Then I used ffmpeg to capture still images so that I could find the best set.

About 10-ish years ago, my then employer was talking to some other company about helping them get their software to release. They had what they believed to be a proprietary compression system that would compress and playback 4k video with no loss in quality.

They wouldn't let us look into the actual codecs or compression, they just wanted us to build a front-end for it.

I got to digging and realized they were just re-encoding the video through FFMpeg with a certain set of flags and options. I was able to replicate their results by just running FFMpeg.

They stopped talking to us.

One more taking part in a time-honoured tradition of taking someone else's thing, adding your own dipping mustard (if even that), and calling it your own.

A new chatbot? Another ChatGPT wrapper. A new Linux Distro. Another Arch with a preinstalled desktop environment. A new video downloader? It's yt-dlp with a GUI.

If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.

> If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.

If it were just individuals doing it, maybe it would've been somewhat digestible. But it's a pity that sometimes even trillion-dollar companies do it.

Pre-LLM days, the doers were atleast aware of their copy/clone/wrapper, but now it's happening unintentionally when LLMs give out modified versions of someone else's code without binding to its license, because AFAIK LLMs do not automatically add licensing details of libraries used inside their outputted code, or do they?

I tried the exact same steps you did with the exact same movie but with Topaz AI and got very bad results which made me abondon the project. I'd be greatful if you could share the upscaled movie.

There’s folks that make entire careers, from tuning ffmpeg.

I’d suspect that this is exactly the type of thing that could be achieved with AI tools, though, so that might be a nervous bunch of people.

Trillion dollar companies are made up of individuals. People don’t start being honest just because they sign on with a Fortune 500.

I always assumed Topaz AI would do a more sophisticated upscaling while FFMpeg only has simpler algorithms. Isn’t that the case?