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
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
Part 2 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract - what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. Stripe never skipped the boring stuff. They ship 1,300 AI PRs a week. Amazon skipped it. Their storefront went down for six hours. Kent Beck wrote the answer in Extreme Programming Explained in 1999. We read it. Then chose velocity anyway. A friend of mine leads engineering at a funde