Show HN: WebAssembly and ffmpeg = Quick clip, overlay, resize and GIF-ize videos

by Andrew_W • 5 years ago

104 49 5 years ago

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

* VM is upgraded - we're back :) *

Hi HN,

I love new web tech, and was excited to see ffmpeg ported to WebAssembly so decided to build a free tool that uses it to:

- Clip/trim videos - Overlay text and images - Resize - Create GIFs or convert to a web-friendly MP4

All of this done in your browser, without ever uploading a file to a web server! (* Except Safari, it doesn't support SharedArrayBuffers)

A little more:

I've been building a video creation app with my cofounder, and being a 2-man team, we wanted to think outside of the box on an "eng as marketing" strategy.

As a techy on a budget, ffmpeg.wasm sounded like the perfect library to make a powerful free tool without requiring a ton of server resources.

So we looked up some common tasks people want to do with videos and set out to build a quick tool to accomplish them.

I think there's a ton more we can build into this - it's been about a 2 week project, but thought it was cool enough to do an initial release now.

Hope you like it, and have suggestions on what we can improve!

phoboslab• 5 years ago

Very cool! I see that SharedArrayBuffers are enabled again, after they were disable due to spectre!?

I have previously tinkered with ffmpeg in the browser and implemented a workaround[1] for the (then) missing pthread support. It turned out quite clunky, but worked.

[1] https://phoboslab.org/files/ffmpeg-mt-fixed/

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Yeah, SharedArrayBuffers have been back and forth!

- First they were disabled due to Spectre. - Chrome reenabled them. - New HTTP headers were added for cross-origin resource partitioning. - FF/Chrome are both requiring those headers (FF now, Chrome next month)

That's awesome that you've played around with this, too. It was quite a bit of fun :)

PowerfulWizard3• 5 years ago

It is a really good idea. My #1 question with this type approach was how big the WASM would end up -- 24MB in this case.

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Yeah, that's definitely an issue!

We had to "optimize" loading it twice.

The first time, I moved it from auto-loading to when the user clicks convert to save on bandwidth.

The second time, I moved it to after a file is selected. That gives it time to load while users are presented with options before converting.

It's definitely a trade-off. For us, the choice was easy-ish because we want to keep the budget down as Indie Hackers, so we can't just offer a free tool that costs a ton in backend/serverless charges.

felixfbecker3• 5 years ago

Any plans to support WEBM? Files are even smaller than MP4, which makes them perfect for replacing GIFs

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Yeah, webm is already built in to ffmpeg, we just had a pretty limited focus for our initial release.

Even our mp4s aren't very well-optimized right now.

If you work with video a bit and think this tool might be helpful to you, let me know!

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

The main reason why I use ffmpeg/edit videos is to take my 3440x1440 screen recordings and crop+resize them in a format friendly for twitter, otherwise twitter will do its own (additional?) resizing and compression which just destroys videos

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Sorry for not responding sooner.

That sounds like a great use case for us to handle! Although I think ffmpeg in the browser loses some efficiency over the command line.

I think we added cropping as a possible future feature. I'll bet ffmpeg makes that really easy to do.

I think we should also work on optimizing the output size. I think we use a pretty high (err, low) -crf, which can result in ridiculous file sizes.

Thanks for the comment! Appreciate hearing use cases :)

iudqnolq2• 5 years ago

Amy advice for someone trying to write code against the ffmpeg api for the first time? It's...esoteric and the "correct" way seems to be reading a bunch of ten year old blog posts by random uncertain people. Even the python binding devs have a disclaimer they aren't confident they understand everything they document, despite doing their best to read the source.

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Oh, no, I have nothing there, sorry! haha

I'm using ffmpeg.wasm, it's basically ffmpeg compiled for the browser, and it's a simple layer where you basically treat it like the ffmpeg command, eg:

ffmpeg.run(['-i', 'input.gif', ..., 'output.gif').then(() => { // handle output file })

jack_riminton• 5 years ago

"Error establishing a database connection" is what I'm getting. Hug of death?

EDIT: working again now, looks pretty cool!

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Uggh yes. Which is awesome, but... damn! haha

Might need to delete and repost later?

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

It's up - for now :)

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Thanks! DO made it kind of easy to upgrade the virtual machine haha.

prussian• 5 years ago

sounds cool. wonder in practice how this will work out with patent encumbered video formats.

Quarrel• 5 years ago

Don't the patent holders want the creation / manipulation of patent encumbered videos?

Unfortunately, of course, they then want to get paid during playback, but that's the reality for everyone already.

had-rien2• 5 years ago

Awesome idea, it is hard to try for now but it could be very useful. I especially like simple clip and resize feature but can't try them right now...

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Sorry if you were having trouble because the website was down. We upgraded the server and it seems to be doing a little better!

But also get it if you mean you're not in a good place to test the tool at the moment haha

had-rien2• 5 years ago

I have managed to try it now, and indeed it is almost perfect for my use case : Often I find videos on youtube for example which I want to show snippet to someone or save it. So I download it easily with youtube-dl but then clipping is never really easy (especially on linux).

To improve the tool it would be nice to play the part clipped with the sound to check if it's ok. Also the tool failed to load one video.

Good job !

arsalanb• 5 years ago

This is great! Another neat project that comes to mind is https://modfy.video

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Oh that tool is neat, and they have a super slick UI!

Our tool definitely isn't as slick, but I think that has its benefits too. Like our trim interface doesn't look as nice, but shows a live preview of where you're at in the video.

I want their UI and style haha

cryogenicplanet• 5 years ago

This is super cool, love to see more people working in this space!

Would love to chat about what you guys doing.Potentially collab and improve both our products!

Reach out rahul@modfy.video

kumarm• 5 years ago

Its amazing what we can do with modern browsers today.

Our app plug: 7 years back we did a quick tool to shrink JPG's in browser (Again needs Chrome or Firefox) without uploading images to server: http://shrinkjpeg.com

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Seriously! We were trying to build our video editor in the same style (eg like tinypng and GIF optimizers).

It's so cool to do it all in the browser!

I even built a simple landing page creator that let you change text and images, then created a zip file that you could extract to your web host - no backend needed!

I think for me, CORS is the biggest hindrance to some of my ideas, esp. around editing, creation, and working with the content.

tonyzzz• 5 years ago

I remembered that WASM application cannot use any kind of hardware acceleration. So have anyone tested the website for large videos?

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Definitely a performance hit! Probably a combination of the lack of hardware acceleration and running in a JS virtual machine.

I haven't checked the exact hit, but that's mostly because our focus for this tool was on people who would never touch ffmpeg or a command line.

Also, the alternative for us would've been to upload remotely and run on Lambda or similar, which I think would lack hardware acceleration as well.

danabrams• 5 years ago

"You might have come across .mov while working with Apple softwares such as QuickTime, it was introduced in 1998 and uses a top secret compression algorithm. It is often quoted as the catalyst to Apple bringing feature length movie quality to their devices."

This description is absolutely killing me.

FunnyLookinHat• 5 years ago

This is awesome - nice job!

Adding the ability to loop the gif back and forth would be great!

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Interesting idea, like append the video to itself but reversed for a clean loop? I like this idea :)

donatj• 5 years ago

I made a similar thing last year that’ll take any gif you throw at it and make a Zoom background compatible video.

https://donatstudios.com/GifAsZoomBackground

baxuz• 5 years ago

Man I wish WebGPU would come soon so that we could get HW acceleration support for a lot of WASM projects.

Andrew_W22• 5 years ago

Yeah, and Spectre/Meltdown haven't helped.

There are some pretty crazy security restrictions (no external scripts!) just to get ffmpeg running. I can't imagine the additional security precautions that would prevent exploits for WebGPU.

Show HN: WebAssembly and ffmpeg = Quick clip, overlay, resize and GIF-ize videos

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