Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

LibreTime VS FFmpeg

Compare LibreTime VS FFmpeg and see what are their differences

LibreTime logo LibreTime

LibreTime is a community driven fork of SourceFabric's Airtime.

FFmpeg logo FFmpeg

Open source multimedia suite for conversion, playback, profiling, and streaming.
  • LibreTime Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-27
  • FFmpeg Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-25

LibreTime videos

LibreTime Tutorial: How to install LibreTime

More videos:

  • Tutorial - LibreTime 101: How to schedule a podcast to play the newest episode on an automatic basis
  • Tutorial - Libretime Tutorial: How to upload and schedule tracks

FFmpeg videos

How to use FFMPEG

More videos:

  • Review - Gentoo in Review - March Updates (FFmpeg or LibAV/CPU FLAGS)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to LibreTime and FFmpeg)
SHOUTcast
100 100%
0% 0
Video
0 0%
100% 100
Broadcast
100 100%
0% 0
Video Converter
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare LibreTime and FFmpeg

LibreTime Reviews

  1. Be prepared to face the terminal

    Running for some (4) years Airtime 2.5.2 (latest free version), now moving to LibreTime because of various runtime (unsupported PHP too old etc.). My description also includes the (painfully) migration of the existing database, so new users might read that part as a story.

    Installation

    Nothing fancy, install OS (Ubuntu 18.04), git and curl are probably already there or at the distance of an sudo apt -y git curl, install icecast and apache2 (or whatever the web server you might need if you plan to pump the stream in a web page), then read the Libre docs, clone the repo and install -fiap.

    Do NOT use Ubuntu later than 18.04 (so no 20) because it will not work.

    Back to installer: did not work 100% mainly because of the post install setup (the web part), which have the habit of not saving the changed password for admin and others, so a nano visit to /etc/airtime/airtime.conf and on liquidsoap might be needed. Also /etc/airtime/icecast_pass might need tweaking as well.

    So I had to stop everything (service apache2 stop, libretime runtime as well), change the passwords to match icecast, move airtime.conf to a backup location and rerun the web part, which worked perfectly.

    [optional] Move of existing airtime database

    Files moved from another server to this new one, 70 GB, rsync, grab a coffee (ok, more than one) and copy everything in the exact same default location (/srv/airtime/stor/). All good. Database move: complete pain. My setup is postgres, which does not support select from one database and insert in another, and the dblink postgres specific thing sucks ass. Also, postgres is quite slow, database fields slightly differs, so I had to export in a CSV the airtime tables (ccfiles, cchistory, ccshow etc.) Some of the tables had around 700.000 rows and I had to do manual SQL in order to map the old existing foreign keys over the new ones - took one day but all good.

    The run

    My setup is one main (webserver + icecast) machine - which acts also as a relay for the second machine - and libretime sits on a second machine. Although the interface is relatively different than what airtime 2.5.2 has, I was able to setup the params, stream, schedule shows etc. in no time. The dragging of tracks into the right panel does not respect the UI (meaning I am dragging between songs 100 and 101 but I end up with the new track somewhere below some rows) but I can live with that. The same limitation of a show that cannot have more than 24 hours is present, but other than that, everything it is running for a week now on a 4 GB RAM machine with CPU sitting most of the time in one digit. Import is very quick, smart blocks is a killer, and it works.

    Conclusion

    Although is not a stable release and is probably driven by a handful of guys having another jobs and doing changes in the spare time, it is a good fork which runs. Be comfortable with ssh and terminal because you might need to do this, especially when integrating with web servers, certbot, redirecting streams to HTTPS, making Icecast SSL-aware etc. But that's how Linux infrastructure is running, so no complains here.

    👍 Pros:    Free|Quick|Community|Minimal documentation|Source-code
    👎 Cons:    Alpha|Setup|Migration

List of Top Free Open Source & Self Hosted Application for Media Streaming
LibreTime – Simple, open source platform that lets you broadcast streaming radio on the web (fork of Airtime). AGPL-3.0 PHP

FFmpeg Reviews

18 Best Video Converter Software in 2022 (Free and Paid)
FFmpeg is the best free video converter software for advanced users or engineers who know a command-line environment. It doesn't come with the GUI. So you can't convert videos by simple clicks as what you're doing with VideoProc Converter or other video converters.
Best Video Converter Software
If you’re not comfortable with using a command line to operate your software, then you may want to stop reading right now. FFmpeg is incredibly powerful, available for all major platforms, and best of all, it’s free – but it doesn’t come with a graphic user interface. Some developers have created GUIs that sit on top of FFmpeg to make the process a bit easier (like...
Top 5 Free Alternatives to Freemake Video Converter
FFmpeg is an open source project that develops libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. FFmpeg is the home to libavcodec, a codec library used by a large spectrum of programs, and libavformat, a mux and demux library for containers. The project develops 4 command-line programs; ffmpeg, the central tool for transcoding multimedia files, as well as ffplay, a simple...
Source: www.easefab.com
8 Best FFmpeg Alternatives & Competitors in 2022 (Free & Paid)
FFmpeg is not always the best solution for everyone. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the 8 best FFmpeg alternatives and competitors.
6 Best HandBrake Alternative to Convert Video to Any Format
FFmpeg is a collection of libraries and tools to process multimedia content such as audio, video, subtitles and related metadata. It is also an open source project. It can convert video/audio to the format you need by encoding and decoding video files. It's suitable for professional to use.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, FFmpeg should be more popular than LibreTime. It has been mentiond 4 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

LibreTime mentions (1)

  • Open source music streaming?
    Https://libretime.org/ seems like a helper tool for setting up icecast and other radio type services? I've only just learned about it just now so you'll want to evaluate it for yourself. Source: over 2 years ago

FFmpeg mentions (4)

  • FFmpeg 7.0 Released
    The fact that Handbrake doesn't expose the same features as the ffmpeg CLI tool is frankly irrelevant. It's not just relevant, it's the whole thing. They asked for an ffmpeg GUI and someone recommended a GUI that doesn't use ffmpeg and doesn't do what ffmpeg can do. Ffmpeg can not only rewire channels, it can stream video, capture video from the screen, capture video from a tv tuner, overlay text etc. Also... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: Is there other software similar to Vim and Emacs?
    FFMpeg and its libraries https://ffmpeg.org/about.html. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Week 13 Project Phase 2
    Hello everyone, welcome to week 13. This blog we are going to pick an open source software and locate the SIMD code from the source code of the software and then determine the SIMD code usage in a certain program. For my blog, I choose FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a cross-platform framework to record, convert, and stream video and audio, it provides an easy way to convert video and audio to other formats. FFmpeg is a very... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • I HATE NITRO I HATE NITRO
    Ffmpeg is a free (GPL) program and library that does pretty much everything video-related, from recording to editing. It has some learning curve for things beyond just converting a file 1:1, but as a library, many programs such as OBS, Blender, Shotcut, Drawpile and KDEnLive implements it for tasks such as rendering and recording videos out of them. Source: about 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LibreTime and FFmpeg, you can also consider the following products

AzuraCast - AzuraCast is a free and open-source self-hosted "web radio station in a box".

HandBrake - HandBrake allows users to easily convert video files into a wide variety of different formats.

Centova Cast - Centova Cast is the world's most advanced Internet radio stream hosting control panel.

Format Factory - Format Factory is software that allows the user to convert media into various file formats. The software is a product of PC Free Time, a Chinese software development company. Read more about Format Factory.

RadioBOSS - RadioBOSS provides professional radio programming engineering and automation at a fraction of what...

Freemake Video Converter - Freemake Video Converter Converts 500+ Formats & Gadgets FREE! Convert to MP4, AVI, MKV, WMV, DVD, Xvid. FREE Download. **Voted Best of 2018** Comes with FREE…