Yes I had trouble finding it too. I guess it's because the ffmpeg API is so enormous and evolving all the time, that if there was to be node bindings for it, it would have to be maintained by the ffmpeg team. I think the CLI is the most stable API contract to the outside world, and everyone in the node world uses the CLI. I had an idea to use node-ffi, though. Which doesn't require linking or bindings or anything. Just call the native ffmpeg code directly from nodejs.