How To Optimize FFmpeg For Fast Video Encoding? [Video Expert’s Blog]

Encoding a content library with thousands of videos into an optimal adaptive format can take weeks. But by using the FFmpeg encoding programs, it’s easier to reduce the time between when videos are uploaded to when they are available in adaptive profiles for streaming.

This blog outlines methods to accelerate the video encoding process with FFmpeg by adjusting parameters such as Presets, CRF Values, Multithreading, and Hardware Acceleration. The goal is to improve encoding speed while maintaining acceptable video quality.

FFmpeg is an open-source, free command-line software, designed for handling and processing multiple sets of video files. The tool is widely used for quick encoding and transcoding videos, making them stream-ready in various output formats like MPEG-TS, RTMP, and HLS.

TikTok, leverages the use of FFmpeg for fast video encoding, allowing its users to create, upload, and share content from mobile phones without much time delay. VLC media player also embraces FFmpeg in its video transcoding programs for seamless adaptive streaming on viewer’s devices.

Internally, we took around 100 raw large video files and used the FFmpeg command-line tool to optimize its parameters such as presets, CRF values, multithreading, and hardware acceleration. The entire encoding process which was supposed to take at least a week, was completed in just 3 days, and that’s a straight 50% cut on the encoding time. Here’s how we did it.

FFmpeg offers various encoding presets that balance speed and quality. The -preset option can be set to the following values, from fastest to slowest:

– ultrafast – superfast – veryfast – faster – fast – medium [default] – slow – slower – veryslow

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4