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
More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively
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,
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
Have you ever looked at code you wrote six months ago and thought: "Who wrote this monster?"? Relax, it happens to all of us. In software engineering, writing code that a machine understands is the easy part. The real challenge is writing code that other humans (including your future self) can understand, maintain, and scale. This is exactly where Software Design Principles come into play. In this
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about