// the find
tejaswigowda/ffmpeg-webCLI
A browser-based video editor powered by ffmpeg.wasm. No uploads, no servers -- all processing happens locally in your browser using WebAssembly.
ffmpeg-webCLI runs ffmpeg entirely in the browser via WebAssembly, giving you 30+ video operations (trim, convert, GIF, compress, overlay, concat) with zero server uploads. It's a privacy-respecting replacement for sites like CloudConvert or Ezgif. The target user is anyone who routinely reaches for an online video tool and would rather not hand their files to a third party.
The raw ffmpeg passthrough mode is genuinely useful — power users get full command access without leaving the browser. Two-pass GIF palette generation is the right approach and better than most dedicated GIF tools. The COOP/COEP header setup for SharedArrayBuffer is handled correctly in the local dev server, which trips up a lot of wasm projects. Active maintenance (last push June 2026) on a project that depends on ffmpeg.wasm, which has a history of breaking API changes, is a real commitment.
Everything lives in one giant index.html plus a worker.js — no build step, no bundler, just a 31 MB wasm blob loaded at runtime. That makes meaningful contributions or forking painful. Performance on large files is brutal: ffmpeg.wasm's single-threaded wasm build is 5–20× slower than native, and there's no progress indication beyond a log panel, so users will think it's hung. The service worker caches the CDN-loaded ffmpeg.wasm binary, but if the CDN URL changes or the package updates, users get stale cache silently — no version checking. GPL-3.0 on the wrapper code is fine, but anyone trying to embed this in a commercial product needs to read the LGPL chain through ffmpeg carefully.