I built a CLI video editor with Python to make FFmpeg user-friendly. Meet `peg_this`!

Hey everyone,

TL;DR: I made a Python CLI tool that puts a friendly, interactive menu on top of FFmpeg for common tasks like converting, cropping, trimming, and joining videos. You can grab it on GitHub here or do a pip install peg-this.

What My Project Does

peg_this is a simple tool that guides you through the process of video editing with interactive menus. Some of the features I’m most proud of:

Convert & Transcode: Convert videos and audio to a wide range of popular formats (MP4, MKV, WebM, MP3, FLAC, WAV, GIF) with simple quality presets. Join Videos (Concatenate): Combine two or more videos into a single file. The tool automatically handles differences in resolution and audio sample rates for a seamless join. Trim (Cut) Videos: Easily cut a video to a specific start and end time without re-encoding for fast, lossless clips. Inspect Media Properties: View detailed information about video and audio streams, including codecs, resolution, frame rate, bitrates, and more. Visually Crop Videos: An interactive tool that shows you a frame of the video, allowing you to click and drag to select the exact area you want to crop. Extract Audio: Rip the audio track from any video file into MP3, FLAC, or WAV. Remove Audio: Create a silent version of your video by stripping out all audio streams. Batch Conversion: Convert all media files in the current directory to a specified format in one go.

It’s built with Python, using ffmpeg-python, Rich for the nice UI, and Questionary for the prompts.

Target Audience

This tool is for you if you love FFmpeg’s power but can never remember the exact syntax for complex filters, or if you hate opening a huge GUI editor just to trim a 10-second clip.

Comparison to Existing Alternatives

While there are many powerful GUI video editors, peg_this offers a lightweight, fast, and scriptable alternative for common video tasks. Unlike using ffmpeg directly, peg_this provides an interactive and user-friendly experience.

The project is open-source and I’d love to get your feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports. Let me know what you think!

Link: https://github.com/hariharen9/ffmpeg-this Profile https://github.com/hariharen9

Hope you find it useful!