ffmpegfs Is A FUSE-Based Filesystem For Transcoding Video And Audio On The Fly When Opened

I recently stumbled across ffmpegfs and found it to be quite useful, so I thought I'd make a post about it, especially since there are no other articles about it.

ffmpegfs is a free and open source FUSE-based read-only transcoding filesystem which converts audio and video formats on the fly when opened and read. It supports many formats, including MP4, WebM, OGG, MP3, OPUS, MOV, ProRes (a MOV container for Apple Prores video & PCM audio) and WAV, among others.

This is useful in case you have many files in your media collection that can't be directly played by some hardware or software (e.g. DaVinci Resolve, which has limited codecs support in the free Linux version) - instead of transcoding the whole media collection you could use ffmpegfs to transcode the files on the fly, when they are accessed / played. You may also use this to easily transcode files: just drop some files in the folder that you've used as an input directory for ffmpegfs, then copy the files from the ffmpegfs output folder and the resulted files will be transcoded to the format you've specified for ffmpegfs.