# FFmpeg Reviews **Vendor:** FFmpeg **Category:** [Other Video Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/other-video) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 20 ## About FFmpeg FFmpeg is a cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. ## FFmpeg Reviews ### 1. The swiss-knife of the video manipulation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** F. Javier P. | Mobile Team Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2021 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** You can do almost anything you want. A lot of other products are based on this piece of software. And it's free! **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** With great power comes great responsibility. The CLI that offers may sometimes be confusing for users **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm using it for transcoding videos (e.g., re-encode a video with other codec or other settings), for creating GIFs from MP4s, and for split videos. Also, for creating thumbnails. ### 2. Without ffmpeg I would not have developed the VOD encoder! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Salma T. | Full Stack Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** Ffmpeg commands can be simple for some tasks. All in one - great capabilities. Logs enabled. media solution. Can make a business. Documentation. I like some key functionities like: Encoding with whatever configs. Used for preparing an adaptive VOD and live streaming solutions. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** Technical barrier. Does not support testing hls. It does not recommend VOD configs for encoding many resolutions. Some parts of the documentation can be hard to get. It does not contain Second Layer of commands over its commands to simplify business tasks for non professionals. (another set of prepared commands for simplicity). Ffmpeg documentation does not contain the best educating materials of setting media configuration. These materials are found on some streaming platforms. I did not find an community that I engaged in and got help from. I did not get a chance to work with this tool more in some other job, so it was not a great thing on the CV that I benifited from in my carear. This is related not to this tool, but to its usage in software companies. **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** Ffmpeg tool is great for working with media. Its commands can be simple for simple work, but it is raw commands and has some technical barrier for challenging tasks. **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ffmpeg helped me develop a media encoder for VOD. Ffmpeg helped me get audio waveshape to display it on player. It helped in getting media info loockup in order to place media info in a CMS. I also used it for concatinating audio to repeat a song that I like! ### 3. FFMPEG experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chamika W. | Freelance, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** FFMPEG is the perfect tool for working with media files, it lends itself as a multi-functional tool offering almost everything (Media compression, Media file type conversion etc etc). Iv used FFMPEG personally to take media streams and prepare them for real time streaming and iv used this tool to compress files with huge data sizes to files with pretty small sizes (something like 800MB to 20MB) after rendering. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** The downsides to using FFMPEG are pretty small, namely it has a little bit of a steep learning curve and it has a CLI. So that might scare most beginners from using this tool. **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** FFMPEG definitely when you need to play around with media files **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** Iv used FFMPEG in: 1. Lose less file compression 2. Media Streaming ### 4. ffmpeg user as a developer and videos maker **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gabriele S. | Researcher, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2021 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** I like the community and the many examples that ffmpeg has. I used ffmpeg for many years as a developer, I created a player and a encoder by using the library. During my Ph.D I also use ffmpeg to create videos. You can find always a solution to do what you need, sometimes it is not easy to create the list of arguments used in the command line version but with the help how the users (stackoverflow, documentation and examples) you can reproduce what you need. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** In my personal experience I found that compile the library on Windows OS is a little bit complicated. You have to setup a lot of stuff and when an error occurs you don't know what is the step of the pipeline that breaks the compile process. I would like to have a simplified process where Visual Studio project is released with ffmpeg **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** follow the example, make use of pre-compiled version of the library and then compile by yourself based on your needs **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** In my previous job I used ffmpeg to create a player that makes use of hardware acceleration. there are many benefits such as a state-of-the-art project the ffmpeg developers add to the library new codecs very quickly. The API are easy to use and you have good performances ### 5. The ultimate toolbox for audio video processing **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ameya T. | Sr. Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 10, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** Ffmpeg is a Swiss-knife for AV developers. It can transcode and trans package AV data in almost any formats. The tools that come with it are very handy too. It’s portability also makes a strong candidate for writing mobile applications. Hardware acceleration support is widespread too. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** Lack of application framework features is something that ffmpeg can improve on. But I think gstreamer is a much better multimedia framework Not having an object oriented wrapper around it is also they can work on. **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** VLC is very good code to study and understand ffmpeg. Use gstreamer if you want to write multimedia application. It internally uses ffmpeg libs **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used ffmpeg to store classification results along side frames in an mpeg2-ts format. That way, during playback, these results which were confidence values , could be used to mark important events in the video. Its API allowed me do almost anything with the data while still being standard compliant ### 6. In a lot cases ffmpeg is my personal go to **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivo M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** The most helpful has to be diversity and ways it can be useful in so many cases. Ive been working in encoding sector for a while, and even with access to insanely priced tools/software, there are only few features that aren't accessable with FFMPEG. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** I wouldn't say that I dislike something per say, although I am struggling when I have to suggest FFMPEG to someone, who might not be used to using a terminal. In other words it would be huge if a cross platform app would pop up **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** Get ready to dig through a respectable amount of info to realise the capabilities that are available **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** FFMPEG is the backbone for our live content delivery solutions, and it takes care of almost everything regarding AV compression and guarantees reliability. ### 7. One Solution for all Audio/Video file problem- "Use FFmpeg" **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** PANKAJ S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 29, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** FFmpeg uses most of the audio/video file formats and can convert it to .mpg, .mkv, .avi, .mp4 and many other formats, which is awesome. **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** FFmpeg has so many options and utilities to use which sometimes are confusing but these many options just tell us that the capabilities of the FFmpeg and what all things we can convert using FFmpeg. **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** One Solution for all Audio/Video file problem- "Use FFmpeg" **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** I wanted to convert old .flv format video to .mp4 format but I was not sure how to do that than on google many people recommended to use FFmpeg and voila it works as charms. I was easily able to convert the video file to .mp4 format without losing the audio/video quality. ### 8. I was scared at first, as I am not a coder, but it is easy to use and very neat **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Performing Arts | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2021 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** I have used it for video editing, after using other paid software, like premiere pro. It is true that you need to get used to it, as it uses coding language - but you can find anything you need to in online tutorials (I could learn it with no previous coding experience). I specially like that it does not occupy much space in laptop, it is a complete new way of video editing, and it is super neat. It easily allows you to change video formats, extract or add audio, change quality of videos... **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** At the beginning you will need to search in internet "hows to" because it does not have an intuitive interface. **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** Video editing, such as adding or substracting audio from a piece, changing the format of the video (i.e. from .avi to .mp4), merging different video clips into a video, adding hard subtitles ### 9. I have used FFMPEG extensively for multimedia and video analytics applications. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit J. | Software Engineer 1 , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** Support for almost all video and audio codes with hw acceleration as well to utilize the platform in the best way **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** lack of interfaces/options to interoperate with native libraries for memory-copy free media pipeline like vaapi, mediasdk, opengl **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** It is very versatile and easy to use set of APIs for a number of multimedia requirements. FFMPEG has a very detailed documentation and community support. **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** Designing Media pipelines for digital signage solutions. FFMPEG provide a great level of modularization and API support for all the video processing. ### 10. The right tool for video application **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Asaf K. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 30, 2020 **What do you like best about FFmpeg?** The best I liked with FFmpeg, is that it can decode any known source I ever see, and I know it will not disappoint me in future... **What do you dislike about FFmpeg?** Doesn't has a real support. Very hard to use mailing list **Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:** Take it! Itls de-facto tool for video. **What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?** I implement a decoder for h.264/HEVC based on media foundation transform, FFmpeg give me the ability of hardware acceleration. ## FFmpeg Discussions - [Why do you need FFmpeg?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/why-do-you-need-ffmpeg) - 1 comment ## Top FFmpeg Alternatives - [Handbrake](https://www.g2.com/products/handbrake/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (152 reviews) - [VideoLan](https://www.g2.com/products/videolan/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (621 reviews) - [Compressor](https://www.g2.com/products/compressor/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (48 reviews)