Comment by greenavocado
4 days ago
Don't forget that Gstreamer exists and its command line and documentation make a little bit more sense than ffmpeg because GStreamer is pipeline based and the composition is a little bit more sane. I stopped using ffmpeg entirely and only use GStreamer for intense video work.
Gstreamer can give you more control and has friendlier API's if you're gonna make a pipeline programatically but for one off stuff ffmpeg seems much friendlier to me. For example it has sane x264 defaults while with gst-launch you have to really know what you're doing to get quality x264 encoding
I thought FFmpeg is pipeline based too; graph of filters. Am I missing something? You can set up a complex graph of source, sink and transform filters.
FFmpeg's filter DSL is so good that I get annoyed if I ever have to fall back to command line switches.
I wish there was some sort of local gui / tool to drag and drop nodes, connect them together, type-check the graph if possible, and it would only show the ffmpeg command to run which you could paste. Anyone know or anything?
see lavfi-preview on github. Its GUI app for libavfilter/FFmpeg filters
You're right, but gstreamer is a little bit more sane for many use cases. Maybe ffmpeg is more advanced; I am not sure. I find the pieces fit together better with gstreamer.
GStreamer feels like abandonware though, they also got big vulnerabilities recently, and their docs are very defunct.
Not sure about the vulns but I am actively discussing things with the devs on their Matrix