ff-stream

Produce HLS and DASH adaptive bitrate output from any video source. Define a rendition ladder, point it at an input file, and receive a package ready for CDN delivery.

ff-stream is a safe, ergonomic wrapper over FFmpeg's adaptive-streaming muxers (the HLS and DASH segmenters in libavformat), driving the encode-and-mux loop from a rendition ladder. Errors are typed and chain their source (StreamError), so a failure reads as an actionable message rather than a raw FFmpeg return code.

It is an independent crate: use it on its own, or combine it with the other ff-* crates to assemble whatever media application, or editing model, you need. The ff-* crates are purified, model-free primitives, so none imposes an editing model on you; avio is one editing engine built on top of them. Each crate is versioned independently; see crates.io for current versions.

Installation

[dependencies]
ff-stream = "0.16"

HLS Output

HlsOutput is a consuming builder. Setters take self and return Self; validation is deferred to build(), and write() performs the encode-and-mux.

use ff_stream::HlsOutput;
use std::time::Duration;

HlsOutput::new("hls_output/")
    .input("source.mp4")
    .segment_duration(Duration::from_secs(6))
    .keyframe_interval(48)
    .build()?
    .write()?;
// Writes hls_output/playlist.m3u8 and numbered segments (segment000.ts, …).

DASH Output

use ff_stream::DashOutput;
use std::time::Duration;

DashOutput::new("dash_output/")
    .input("source.mp4")
    .segment_duration(Duration::from_secs(4))
    .build()?
    .write()?;
// Writes dash_output/manifest.mpd and the corresponding segments.

Rendition Ladder

AbrLadder produces multi-rendition HLS or DASH output from a single input. Each Rendition specifies the output resolution and target bitrate. The ladder owns its own terminal methods: hls(output_dir) and dash(output_dir).

use ff_stream::{AbrLadder, Rendition};

AbrLadder::new("source.mp4")
    .add_rendition(Rendition { width: 1920, height: 1080, bitrate: 6_000_000 })
    .add_rendition(Rendition { width: 1280, height:  720, bitrate: 3_000_000 })
    .add_rendition(Rendition { width:  854, height:  480, bitrate: 1_500_000 })
    .hls("hls_output/")?;
// Writes hls_output/master.m3u8 plus a numbered sub-directory per rendition.

Error Handling

MSRV

Rust 1.93.0 (edition 2024).

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0