FFmpeg creative capabilities: four panels showing generative art with mandelbrot fractals, audio waveform visualization, mathematical function rendering, and color gradient generation -- all from ffmpeg filter commands

I always thought FFmpeg was just for converting videos. Turns out it’s a hidden generative art studio with 450+ filters.

What You Can Create

Audio visualizations — spectrograms, piano roll displays, 3D scopes, Lissajous patterns. Feed it music, get mesmerizing visuals.

Math-generated videos — Mandelbrot zooms, Conway’s Game of Life, cellular automata, Perlin noise clouds. No source footage needed.

Pixel shaders — plasma effects, hypnotic rings, tunnel animations. Each pixel computed from equations.

Image-to-sound — draw something, hear what it sounds like.

Prompts for Your AI Agent

Just tell your favourite coding agent:

  • “Create a scrolling spectrogram video from this audio file with nebula colors”
  • “Generate a 60-second Mandelbrot fractal zoom video”
  • “Make a Conway’s Game of Life animation with cyan cells and mold trails”
  • “Create animated Perlin noise clouds in 1080p”
  • “Generate hypnotic expanding rings using FFmpeg’s geq filter”

What I Made

Six meditation videos, pure FFmpeg:

  1. Cosmic Fractals — Mandelbrot + Game of Life
  2. Ethereal Clouds — Perlin noise
  3. Digital Patterns — Cellular automata
  4. Plasma Dreams — Mathematical shaders
  5. Chromatic Waves — Animated gradients
  6. Sound Geometry — Music-reactive visuals

PS: Gist with full commands if you want to peek under the hood.