fwf: FFmpeg video editor

If you are a consumer considering using this software, don’t. This was an experiment and important features don’t work or are missing. Olive is an open source video editor that you may be interested in. Read the Inherent problems section for more information.

Video editing software in JavaScript, made with Electron, on top of FFmpeg using fluent-ffmpeg. Provides a simple GUI for editing videos with FFmpeg with a timeline, preview, and filter editor.

Architecture:

• Fluent-ffmpeg in the main process, starting ffmpeg processes as needed.
• GUI in the renderer process, stores all of the information and only sends render instructions to main over IPC.
• Express HTTP server in main process for streaming preview video.

Filter editor

JSON editor GUI using jsoneditor, with presets. This lets you edit the filters that are passed to fluent-ffmpeg, which then turns them into FFmpeg options. This means you can use any video filter the FFmpeg binary supports.

Inherent problems

This was an experiment to see if a consumer grade video editor is possible to make with HTML and JavaScript. I would say it is possible, the result just isn’t very good. It’s also obviously not pure JavaScript, since it uses FFMpeg as a backend. Problems:

1. Previews are slow, unreliable and limited, because the preview is rendered in FFMpeg and streamed through an internal server to the renderer. I also haven’t been able to implement the streams feature, which would make it capable of rendering multiple clips chained together for the preview.
2. FFMpeg wasn’t designed for a consumer grade video editing app. HTML & JavaScript weren’t designed for making desktop apps.
3. The FFMpeg binary has to be bundled with the app for easier installation, and this means using a custom build configuration. Into this custom configuration I haven’t been able to integrate the Vue compilation that would be necessary to make the interface entirely Vue-based.

If you would like to use it anyway, you’re free to do so. If you would like to help out with the development, PRs are greatly appreciated.

Running and building from source

To run from source, clone this repository, and inside the app/ directory, install the dependencies with npm install or yarn. You have to provide your own ffmpeg binaries for running and building, so download the ffmpeg and ffprobe executables from an ffmpeg distribution of your choice. Both executables are required. You then place these inside app/bin/ in a folder matching your architecture: by default, darwin and win64 are supported. This is detected in app/index.js, so if your architecture is not darwin or win64 you have to modify that file otherwise it won’t start. Then you run npm run start or yarn start inside app/ to start fwf.

Build with electron-builder using app/node_modules/.bin/electron-builder in the root directory. The build setup is quite complicated, because of the fact that the ffmpeg binaries need to be available at runtime, so there are a lot of ways it can go wrong.

License

Released under the MIT license, see LICENSE.