# FFmpeg 232 Hacker News commenters recommended FFmpeg and 94 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 15 years (7 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** The near-universal, decades-proven tool for converting, remuxing, trimming and streaming almost any audio or video format, though its command-line syntax is notoriously hard to learn. ## Why people recommend it - Handles nearly any media format (6 comments): "FFmpeg provides mature, well-tested support for decoding, transcoding, resampling, mixing, and muxing across a wide range of formats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489648)) "ffmpeg is super powerful, you can technically resize and alter videos into a consistent format and then encode a new video too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514903)) "ffmpeg has long solved the task of outputting HLS, DASH or whatever else standard and it Just Works No Matter Where" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377692)) - Easy to script and pipe (4 comments): "FFmpeg doesn't care whats on the other end (e.g. redirect to file, read via Python, etc) due to these lovely abstractions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097416)) "calling ffmpeg as external binary to handle some multimedia processing would be one of those cases where simple is better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666172)) "spawn ffmpeg as a child process from node, pipe stdin/stdout directly and skip disk entirely for intermediate steps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332476)) - Mature, foundational infrastructure (5 comments): "FFmpeg provides mature, well-tested support for decoding, transcoding, resampling, mixing, and muxing across a wide range of formats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489648)) "that has kept it one of the https://xkcd.com/2347/ pieces of everyone's infrastructure for over 2 decades." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45892271)) "The ffmpeg project is used to dealing with these matters, and will keep your codec working for eternity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593755)) - Fast, simple remuxing and trimming (2 comments): "change the container format (remux it) using ffmpeg, copying the video and audio streams directly across" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465985)) "I don't find trimming videos with ffmpeg particularly difficult, is just-ss xx -to xx -c copy basically." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401386)) ## What people warn about - Complex, hard-to-remember syntax (5 comments): "I considered FFmpeg a great project, but I usually avoid to use it directly because of his quite complex syntax" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45811570)) "every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422923)) "I hate ffmpeg though, the UX is just insane, so I tend more towards tools that produce the arcane command structures for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395686)) - Security vulnerabilities in codecs (3 comments): "AFAIK, since the codec is enabled by default, anyone who processes a maliciously crafted .mp4 file with ffmpeg is vulnerable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45892122)) "If widely deployed infrastructure software is so full of vulnerabilities that its maintainers can't fix them as fast as they're found" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896023)) "The main failing of the ffmpeg team is that they should have spent more time on architectural hardening and mitigations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513878)) - Unhelpful defaults (2 comments): "ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401788)) "Can't make frame perfect cuts without re-encoding, unless your cut points just so happen to be keyframe aligned." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407765)) - Build and upgrade dependency pain (2 comments): "getting the stock ffmpeg to compile/build might be "easy", but once you start adding on additional codecs and other features that get you into dependency nightmares "easy" is not the word I would use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415825)) "Over the years I've had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870176)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Ez FFmpeg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ez-ffmpeg.md): 17 recommend - [GStreamer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gstreamer.md): 12 recommend - [FFmpeg WebCLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ffmpeg-webcli.md): 9 recommend - [ffmpeg.wasm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ffmpeg-wasm.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "FFmpeg", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ffmpeg/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).