// the find
welovemedia/ffmate
FFmate is a modern and powerful automation layer built on top of FFmpeg - designed to make video and audio transcoding simpler, smarter, and easier to integrate
FFmate is a REST API wrapper around FFmpeg that adds a job queue, watchfolders, presets, webhooks, and a web UI. It runs as a standalone server you integrate against rather than a library you import. The target audience is developers who need to bolt transcoding into existing systems without managing FFmpeg invocations and process lifecycle themselves.
SQLite for storage means zero external dependencies to get running — single binary, drop it anywhere. The pre/post-processing hook system is genuinely useful: arbitrary scripts around each job means you can handle S3 uploads, notifications, or format detection without patching FFmate itself. Cluster mode sharing a database gives you horizontal scale on a budget. The test suite covers controllers end-to-end via a real test server rather than unit-testing handlers in isolation, which catches more real bugs.
AGPL-3.0 is a hard stop for anyone building a commercial product on top of this — you'd either be forced to open-source your application or negotiate a commercial license, and there's no mention of one. SQLite as the shared cluster database is a liability: SQLite's write serialization will bottleneck you the moment you have more than a couple of workers hammering the job queue concurrently. The wildcard/dynamic naming system is custom-built and underdocumented — you'll be reading source to understand edge cases. No retry or dead-letter queue for failed jobs beyond what you wire up yourself in post-processing scripts.