Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com You need a thumbnail from a video file. Maybe you're building a video gallery, generating preview images for a CMS, or creating social media cards from uploaded content. The usual advice is to install FFmpeg on your server and write extraction scripts. That works until you need it in production. FFmpeg can extract a single frame from any video using two fla
I use AI coding agents every day. I believe they are reshaping how we build software, and I think the teams that adopt them deliberately will outperform those that don't. I am not writing this to warn you away from AI-assisted development. I am writing this because the loudest voices in the AI enthusiasm camp are also the most allergic to discussing what can go wrong. And that worries me more than
Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com Zapier doesn't support FFmpeg. You can't install binaries, run shell commands, or execute video processing natively in a Zap. If you've tried, you've probably hit the same wall everyone else does. But Zapier can make HTTP requests. And that's all you need. By calling FFmpeg Micro's REST API from a Zapier webhook action, you can transcode, compress, convert,
On Second Thought — Episode 06 The ORM hides the SQL. The cache hides the ORM. The service mesh hides the services. The operator hides the YAML, which already hid the kubelet, which already hid the container, which already hid the process. By Tuesday, nobody quite remembers what the original problem was. They are too busy configuring its sixth wrapper. This is the post about that wrapper. When som
If you've ever tried to download a video from Reddit, you've probably ended up with a silent MP4 file. No audio. No error. Just a video that should have sound but doesn't. This isn't a bug in your downloader. It's how Reddit stores videos. Most video platforms (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) serve videos as a single muxed file — video and audio combined in one stream. Easy to download, plays anywhere. Re
Every team experiences incidents. The teams that grow stronger from them are the ones that take postmortems seriously — not as blame sessions, but as structured learning opportunities. Yet most postmortems end up as a wall of text nobody reads twice, filed away and forgotten until the same incident happens again six months later. This guide walks you through writing postmortems that genuinely chan