Multimedia processing with FFMpeg and Python — Michał Rokita

FFmpeg is a powerful multimedia processing tool that supports most audio, video and subtitle codecs, acting as a “Swiss Army knife” for media manipulation

FFprobe is a companion tool for inspecting multimedia files, providing detailed metadata about codecs, duration, bitrate and streams

FFmpeg Python is a convenient wrapper library that makes it easier to work with FFmpeg from Python code, though it appears to be unmaintained currently

For complex video processing pipelines, FFmpeg’s filter graphs allow chaining multiple operations together, like edge detection, overlays, and histograms

FFmpeg can handle both file-based processing and real-time streaming scenarios

The tool is widely used internally by many applications like Chrome, Audacity, Blender, OBS Studio and YouTube

FFmpeg Python provides helper functions for subprocess management and returns FFprobe results as Python dictionaries for easier parsing

When doing frame-by-frame processing, FFmpeg can pipe raw video frames to Python for manipulation with libraries like OpenCV

Testing FFmpeg processing can be done by using FFprobe to verify output file properties and stream characteristics

While the CLI is good for basic operations, using wrapper libraries makes complex processing more maintainable, especially when combining multiple filters