FFglitch, FFmpeg fork for glitch art

(ffglitch.org)

Comments

dylan604 13 September 2025
I love how we try to recreate things that are errors to add realism to something too clean. I've spent many hours in front of tape machines from analog to digital, and each format has its peculiarities when glitching. The analog formats had drop outs and other noise from the analog nature as well as things like head switching. There were also the various methods of drop out compensation like BCSP that would repeat the last good line which could lead to some interesting "smearing". Then there are other things that get imitated like when a monitor would lose sync and you'd see the horizontal/vertical blanking rolling through the screen or lose one of or swap the UV channels. The digital tape formats that had DCT blocks started displaying what this glitch art is inspired by (for lack of better phrasing). So for someone this "inside baseball", it would be a problem when these issues happened so it takes a second to get over the initial "oh no that needs to be fixed" to "that looks cool!"
mmcclure 12 September 2025
Not a lot of info on the page about the process, etc, but this is also called "datamoshing." If you're curious, there's a great talk from Demuxed '21 on some of the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtia43DGSrY
MitPitt 13 September 2025
Awesome! I remember seeing Datamosh 2 plugin for After Effects, but didn't know it used this open source project. Turns out there is a whole bunch of GUIs for ffglitch: https://ffglitch.org/frontends/
tentacleuno 12 September 2025
This page doesn't explain what FFglitch does, or how it's different to ffmpeg. For instance, what's Glitch? I'm guessing it's an architecture, but the post doesn't explain what it is or contextualize the term "architecture."
BoardsOfCanada 13 September 2025
At university we implemented a DCT+quantization encoder/decoder for audio, and had a buggy version produce these super alien, beautiful sounds. I've often wished I had saved that version.
nemesis1637 16 September 2025
I know this is three days old but I've been playing with this since I saw this post. It's blowing my mind. I'm obsessed. I've got some cool results from processing many effects on top of each other (one after another) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odiljzvpz_8
npteljes 13 September 2025
Old school techno and a trippy video, love to see it! In case anyone's interested, it's published as "Emmanuel - Chainreaction", available on youtube as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uEj2c1YQc4

jcynix 13 September 2025
There's also the Glitch Lab app on Android and the author has a number of tutorial videos available:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnfdj-gV14N5JTGybk4kkVpyL...

chakintosh 13 September 2025
Kanye West's "Welcome to Heartbreak" Is imo one of the best uses of this effect
drmpeg 13 September 2025
Here's some "glitch art" made with an SDR transmitter output power set to exactly the SNR threshold of the receiver.

https://www.w6rz.net/pixellation.mp4

mertleee 16 September 2025
Is there any way to use this in conjunction with a mask overlay filter in ffmpeg if I just want to "glitch" part of a video?
ttoinou 13 September 2025
My favorite datamoshing video is from 2010 before it was cool

Apres le feu de Jacques Perconte

https://www.jacquesperconte.com/oe?28

bawolff 12 September 2025
You know, i was all ready to be dismissive of this, using encoder errors for art sounds silly.

But i watched the video and it really was cool and artistic.

maxglute 13 September 2025
Nice, watching too much datamosh / glitch art makes my brain tetris effect glitches in my dreams.
longt1melurker 15 September 2025
simple in-browser javascript based mp4 glitch datamosher: https://free-online-app.com/glitch-vid-datamosh
pkdpic 13 September 2025
this is beautiful, the video with the two guys in the urban landscape was especially inspiring, looking forward to experimenting with this someday
jedbrooke 13 September 2025
cool art! seeing datamoshing like this always impresses me at how much motion is encoded in modern video codecs
Hamuko 13 September 2025
Didn't we already have VLC for this?
mkl 12 September 2025
Glitch art, not glitch arch. The main page https://ffglitch.org/ is a slightly better introduction to the project.