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Comment by greenavocado | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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