Comparison with ffmpeg-cli-wrapper

[NebelNidas]

I'm looking for a library that provides Java bindings for FFmpeg. During my research I stumbled upon both ffmpeg-cli-wrapper and this repo here, ffmpeg4j. From a quick glance it looks like both projects share the same goals, however ffmpeg-cli-wrapper seems to be the older and more established option compared to ffmpeg4j. Which leaves me with two questions:

1. Are there any major differences between the two libraries?
2. If no, why was ffmpeg4j created?

Would be nice if this could be mentioned in the README as well.

[Manevolent]

Are there any major differences between the two libraries?
FFmpeg4j solves a specific use case where you don't want to/can't run a sidecar executable (i.e. ffmpeg.exe) to delegate processing. While the ffmpeg-cli-wrapper project is certainly a good fit for a wide variety of use cases, in my specific scenario I needed a project that could move data efficiently. I found piping byte-streams from another executable via stdin/stdout to be inefficient. FFmpeg4j works directly inside the JRE using JavaCPP's JNI bindings, so real-time tasks like livestreaming are far more performant; this would be my big sales pitch. Also useful is having programmatic access to enumerate the individual streams, as well as seeking being supported now.

For a more real world example, I've used FFmpeg4j to do transcoding (something that project does phenomenally I assume), but I'm able to directly hand a Java HTTP response stream to FFmpeg. I can avoid hitting the filesystem at all, which is something I really needed. Most CLI wrappers are going to want a file input, or pipe them a media file via stdin, both of which have throughput issues in my testing.

Without really doing a ton of research into the CLI wrapper, I would say an advantage FFmpeg4j has is that you have a very low-level API into FFmpeg objects (streams, frames, codecs, etc.) since it's based around JavaCPP, and you have the memory management handled for you as well (i.e. object/resource cleanup). So, you have a lot more control if you're doing something other than file-to-file transcoding or something.

Due to ffmpeg-cli-wrapper's sheer visibility and maintenance, it's going to be a better choice for production for any use case that FFmpeg4j isn't specifically targeting. I don't have a ton of focus on this project; you'll see my response time isn't exactly dependable for big production projects.

I'm going to leave this ticket open so other people can see my thoughts on this until I can draw up a better comparison on the README.