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Usage

Important

ffmpeg and ffprobe must be installed and available in the PATH environment variable.

effy supports local sources:

effy input.mp4

and remote sources:

effy "https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/sample/BigBuckBunny.mp4"

CLI

For media processing, the input argument is required and should be specified last. effy has the following command-line arguments:

  • --help show CLI help.
  • --version show effy version.
  • --show-config show the default configuration and standard config path.
  • --config <PATH> load configuration from a specific file.
  • --preset <preset> specifies a set of preconfigured parameter values.
  • --apply applicable only if preset is specified. It starts processing the input in CLI mode immediately without displaying the TUI.

See Configuration for config paths, precedence and settings, and Themes for customizing the TUI colors.

Presets

Preset is a semicolon-separated list of parameters with their values that will be preconfigured once TUI is displayed.

Example:

effy --preset "noaudio=1;vbitrate=90k;scale=400;output=mp4" input.mp4

If the --apply argument is specified, the TUI won't be displayed and processing will start immediately.

See GitHub demo.


TUI

Terminal window

effy has 3 selectable panes: parameters, info and output. The Parameters pane is focused by default. Press Tab or Shift+Tab to switch focus.

TUI TUI

Parameters pane

This pane contains a list of parameters to change based on the type of source provided. The list is dynamically constructed and parameters are automatically disabled when they can't be applied.

Info pane

Contains general information about the provided source: file name, duration, number of streams and their types, bit rate, codecs, dimensions, etc. Basically, it's a structured ffprobe output in one pane.

Use I to quickly switch to this pane.

Output pane

When rendering starts (S or Ctrl+S) the FFmpeg processing output redirects to this pane.

To stop processing, for example, after realizing that a parameter was set incorrectly, hit Q or ++Esc++ while media is being rendered. This sends a stop signal to ffmpeg.

Use O to quickly switch to this pane.

Portrait mode

If terminal width is not wide enough to fit Params and Output panes, effy switches to a Portrait mode. In this mode all panes arranged vertically and modals horizontal spacing is removed.