
The installation process is pretty straightforward if you are on Mac or Linux machine. Also, in our examples, there won’t be anything too fancy going on. It also implements many useful features, such as tracking the progress of a command and error handling.Īlthough the commands can get pretty complicated quickly, there’s very good documentation available for the tool. The library, available on npm, generates the FFmpeg commands for us and executes them. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.īoasting such an impressive resume, FFmpeg is the perfect choice for video manipulation done from inside of the program, able to run in many different environments.įFmpeg is accessible through CLI, but the framework can be easily controlled through the node-fluent-ffmpeg library. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. In the documentation, we read:įFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. Manipulating a video with Node.js itself would be extremely hard, so instead we are going to use the most popular video manipulation tool: FFmpeg. We are going to take a closer look at how to implement both of these approaches. Another popular way of creating a preview is to take a few frames from a video and make a slideshow.

YouTube, for instance, plays a 3- to 4-second excerpt from a video whenever users hover over its thumbnail. Generating video previews with Node.js and FFmpegĮvery website that deals with video streaming in any way has a way of showing a short preview of a video without actually playing it.

Maciej Cieślar Follow A JavaScript developer and a blogger at.
