---
title: FFmpeg Reviews
meta_title: 'FFmpeg Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2'
meta_description: Filter 20 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to
  find out how FFmpeg works for a business like yours.
aggregate_rating:
  rating_value: 4.6
  review_count: 20
  scale: '5'
date_modified: '2026-07-12'
parent_category:
  name: Video
  url: https://www.g2.com/categories/video
---

# 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. Easy to Use and More Control in Processing Video and Audio

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Angela T. | Director of Creative Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2022

**What do you like best about FFmpeg?**

It is easy and quick to use where you don't have to open another application to use it. As long as you're comfortable with using the command line, you can use it for audio and video compressions, conversions, and many other tasks available from their library.

**What do you dislike about FFmpeg?**

There's a learning curve with using the command lines to perform the tasks you want for your video or audio files. I regularly need to reference their documentation or look up the syntax of the commands to perform the tasks I need.

**Recommendations to others considering FFmpeg:**

It can be intimidating to use if you're not used to running commands with the command line. But there is good documentation on the FFmpeg site to help with examples online if you search for how to do file compressions, conversions, and other tasks.

**What problems is FFmpeg solving and how is that benefiting you?**

It has been helping me compress and optimize videos further than what I could previously do from other applications. It has been beneficial in getting video file sizes smaller for rich media ads since Chrome's ad interventions regarding ad weights have been introduced recently.

  ### 2. 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.

  ### 3. 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!

  ### 4. 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

  ### 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

- [View FFmpeg pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ffmpeg/reviews/ffmpeg-review-4570533?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-14+07%3A27%3A50+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=76fa85cf-aa25-4319-b208-c454948a5f44&secure%5Btoken%5D=05de2ac10d95a89945d780583afe7d21dce725694d5062031a0c1b229cf41877&format=llm_user)


## Top FFmpeg Alternatives
  - [Handbrake](https://www.g2.com/products/handbrake/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (153 reviews)
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