[FFmpeg-user] Blender: a FFmpeg frontend?

[Rob Hallam]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 at 05:24, Jamenson Espindula <jafesp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am totally new to Blender, but I noticed that software uses some
> libraries from the FFmpeg project (libavcodec, libavdevice,
> libavformat, etc.). Also, Wikipedia says Blender uses FFmpeg. Blender
> itself says ("Output Properties") the "File Format" in the Video
> Sequence Editing (VSE) is "FFmpeg Video".

As a preamble/aside, I've found the Blender forums to be a helpful
resource (https://blenderartists.org/). If you have a sustained
interest in technical details there's a development/technical forum as
well.

> So,
>
> #1: is Blender a kind of frontend of FFmpeg?

Blender can use ffmpeg to write nedia files. It looks like avformat
libs are also used for importing (some?) media, but I haven't had more
than a trivial glance at the code. This doesn't mean that Blender is
simply a frontend for ffmpeg in the way Kdenlive and co are frontends
for the MELT framework, however.

> #2: Can all Blender's operations on video be achieved by FFmpeg?

What operations on video in particular do you mean? If you mean
everything you can do in the VSE (video sequence editor) then the
answer is that you can probably, by dint of effort, achieve many of
the same outcomes via ffmpeg that you can with Blender and possibly
more- but the obvious question arises: why? Trying to manage a long
complex filtergraph with many filters/operations "by hand" in ffmpeg
is non-trivial.

Cheers,
Rob