Build a UGC video moderation pipeline with FFmpeg + NudeNet

TL;DR If your product lets strangers upload video, you need moderation before launch, not after the first bad upload. We will build a small-team pipeline: extract frames with FFmpeg, score them with NudeNet (ONNX Runtime, CPU-friendly), route uploads into approve / human-review / block by confidence, and log every decision. No trust-and-safety department required. 📦 Code: github.com/USER/ugc-moderation, replace before publishing ⚠️ Note: this is a sensitive area. The goal here is the engineering shape (sampling, scoring, routing, auditing), not detection of any specific content. Keep test fixtures clean and lawful. A model does not decide what is allowed. It produces a score. You decide where the lines go. The whole design is about routing scores sensibly and sending the uncertain middle to a human. The architecture 🧠 upload ──> extract sample frames (ffmpeg) ──> score frames (NudeNet / ONNX) ──> aggregate to one confidence ──> route: high-confidence clean -> auto-approve uncertain middle band -> human review queue high-confidence violation -> auto-block ──> write an audit record for every decision The economics only work if the middle band is small. A decent model makes most uploads obviously fine or obviously not, so a human only ever sees the genuinely ambiguous slice. 1. Sample frames, do not score every frame You cannot afford every frame and you do not need it. Pull one frame per second (or scene-change keyframes) with FFmpeg. # extract 1 frame per second into ./frames mkdir -p frames ffmpeg -i upload.mp4 -vf "fps=1" -q :v 3 frames/frame_%05d.jpg Prefer scene changes to catch more variety with fewer frames: # keyframes where the scene actually changes ffmpeg -i upload.mp4 -vf "select='gt(scene,0.3)',showinfo" -vsync vfr frames/scene_%05d.jpg 💡 Tip: a 30-minute upload at 1 fps is ~1,800 frames. Scene-change sampling often cuts that by an order of magnitude with little loss for moderation purposes. 2. Score frames with NudeNet NudeNet runs on ONNX Runtime on pla