rff-cli

The command-line front-ends of remade_ffmpeg_rs — a ground-up, permissively-licensed Rust rebuild of FFmpeg. Installs rff and rffprobe, which speak the FFmpeg flags you already know.

• Familiar flags — -i, -c:v, -c:a, -b:v, -b:a, -q:a, -crf, -f, -y/-n, -map, -vf, -filter_complex, -frames:v, -codecs, -formats.
• Pure Rust on the default path — no C, no FFI, no copyleft. Apache-2.0.
• Optional drop-in names — --features drop-in-names additionally installs executables named ffmpeg and ffprobe. Off by default, because installing them shadows a real FFmpeg on your PATH and that should be your explicit choice.
• --features https adds https:// streaming input on a pure-Rust rustls stack.
• A thin shell over the rff engine — anything the CLI does is available as a library call.

Install

cargo install rff-cli

# List what this build supports — just like FFmpeg:
rff -codecs
rff -formats

# Inspect a file:
rffprobe input.mp4

# Encode audio with an in-house, pure-Rust encoder:
rff -i input.wav -c:a aac -b:a 128k -y output.m4a
rff -i input.wav -c:a flac -y output.flac
rff -i input.wav -c:a vorbis -q:a 4 -y output.ogg

# Transcode video:
rff -i input.mp4 -c:v vp9 -crf 32 -y output.webm

Want the drop-in ffmpeg/ffprobe names so existing scripts work unchanged?

cargo install rff-cli --features drop-in-names

Build prerequisite — nasm. The default build enables h264-asm (rusty_h264's hand-written SIMD kernels), which assembles with nasm. Install it (winget install NASM / brew install nasm / apt install nasm), or use --no-default-features for the pure-Rust scalar H.264 path.

Trademark. This is an independent, clean-room reimplementation, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from the source code of the FFmpeg project. "FFmpeg" is a trademark of Fabrice Bellard. The optional ffmpeg/ffprobe executable names exist solely for command-line compatibility; the product is remade_ffmpeg_rs.

Part of Remade With Rust

This crate is one layer of remade_ffmpeg_rs — a ground-up, permissively-licensed Rust rebuild of FFmpeg: a drop-in ffmpeg/ffprobe CLI on pure-Rust codecs, with no copyleft. Most users want the remade-ffmpeg engine facade or the rff-cli binaries rather than this crate directly.

Also check out our sister project FFAI — media for an AI-first world — and the rest of github.com/remade-with-rust, including the standalone codec crates rusty_h264, rusty_vp9, rusty_mp3, rusty_aac, rusty-opus, rusty_vorbis, and the rusty-av1-toolkit forks.

About Mata Network

Mata Network builds sovereign, self-hostable infrastructure. Remade With Rust is our open-source home for the permissively-licensed building blocks that work depends on.

License

Apache-2.0. See the workspace LICENSE.