[booi]

Supports hundreds of file formats both new and ancient, ability to control every aspect of encoding, uses libx264/x265 which are much better than the libraries available in AVFoundation etc..

What does AVFoundation do that ffmpeg cannot? Probably streaming libraries, Dolby Vision support, hardware accelerated encoding.

AVFoundation is great for what it is, an OS embedded library.

[CharlesW]

> …uses libx264/x265 which are much better than the libraries available in AVFoundation etc.

Citations? As a counter-example, AVFoundation's AAC encoder trounces anything in ffmpeg, which ffmpeg thankfully exposes suffixed "_at".

  ffmpeg -i input.wav -c:a aac_at -profile:a aac_he -b:a 64k output.m4a

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Apple_AAC

[booi]

Oh I thought we were talking about AVFoundation which is more for video than audio.

It's well known[1] that x264 is the best h.264 encoding library and produces the highest quality at the lowest bitrate (obviously at the expense of encoding speed). Software encoders for any codec are generally going to get better quality results at lower bitrates because of their ability to use more complex features.

OS library encoders are generally more focused on streaming and bitrate stability than quality. And to be honest, QAAC (Apple Core Media's AAC encoder) is kind of an anomaly that I'd chalk up to the absolute amazing amount of engineering that went into the ipod/iphone era.

[1] https://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/

[saagarjha]

ffmpeg supports hardware acceleration too via VideoToolbox.