CLI Tools

#1

What CLI tools are you using, why & how?

  • imagemagick has all sorts of image editing / resizing / etc. You can stitch animations from image sequences with it.
  • gifsicle focuses on animated gifs
  • ffmpeg what’s this - it supports HAP now?
  • moviepy not a CLI, but lots of ways to create edit video programmatically (check this tutorial)
  • youtube-dl aptly named

All of these could probably have their own threads, but want to see what others are using. Got any handy scripts you use with these tools?

#2

Those are some great CLI’s there!

Just as a note, here is a link to a section on the HAP site that explains using FFmpeg a bit,
http://hap.video/using-hap.html#ffmpeg

#3

It isn’t particularly applicable to the world of live visuals, but we recently did a bit of work helping fix some bugs / add some features to this command line tool that is used as part of an interesting .mxf to ProRes workflow, https://github.com/Vidvox/prores-encoder-mac

#4

OSX Automator is worth checking out.

I recently created a “gif2mp4” service with it, which allowed me to select a bunch of gif animations and Right click to run the same ffmpeg script over & over. Playback of multiple GIFs take up a lot of CPU so batch conversion to MP4 (& then HAP) helped performance quite a bit.

A good starting point is http://michal.karzynski.pl/blog/2013/01/13/how-turn-shell-commands-mac-os-x-services/

#5

You already covered most of the graphics tools i’m aware of, but here are some system tools I use daily when running VDMX servers:

  • mpv media player.
  • m-cli for various system info/settings.
  • dshb for a small system stats monitor. Really handy to keep an eye on media servers back stage. Takes a bit of SMCKit/HWMonitor tweaking to get your dGPUs reporting tho.
  • glances for process monitoring.
  • lnav for log view/searching

More of a server than a tool, but I use OLA for converting my Video to DMX’s Art-Net outputs to sACN.