Blog / FFmpeg Explorer
I’m teaching a class at School for Poetic Computation this fall called Infinite Video. The goal of the class is to explore video archives with code, and I had planned to do a section on FFmpeg, the notoriously powerful and obtuse command-line media manipulator. So, I thought, what if I just made a little something to help students figure out how to use FFmpeg outside the command line – a friendlier way to introduce the tool to beginners. One week later and things have spiraled completely out of control. I’ve built a pretty functional web-based video editor that helps you generate FFmpeg commands in a visual, node-based environment. The tool lets you play around with most (but not all) FFmpeg filters, render videos in the browser (!), import your own files and/or work with demo videos, export gifs and mp4s, and it comes with a few built-in examples of the many fun things one can do with FFmpeg.
The central feature of FFmpeg Explorer is a node-based editor that allows you to chain inputs and filters together, built using the xyflow svelte library (which works great despite being in “alpha”). For simple use cases you can select a filter name and it will get automatically inserted into the graph. Clicking on a filter in the graph opens up an options panel where you can modify the filters parameters. To get this working I parsed the help output for each filter to get parameter names, mins, maxes, and default values. As you use the tool, it generates a command that you can paste into your terminal for local execution.
