If you’ve worked with FFmpeg beyond one-liners, you know how quickly things get messy.

What starts as a reasonable command slowly turns into a fragile, unreadable blob — especially once adaptive bitrate outputs, multiple renditions, and different profiles enter the picture.

While building a video pipeline in Go, I hit this wall hard. So instead of copy-pasting yet another FFmpeg command, I wrote a small helper library to bring some structure back.

The Idea

The goal wasn’t to hide FFmpeg or replace it.

I wanted:

• explicit, readable command generation
• a way to define encoding ladders without magic
• something testable and maintainable in a Go codebase

The result is a small, opinionated helper that still outputs plain FFmpeg commands — just assembled in a more predictable way.

What It Helps With

Right now, the focus is on ABR workflows:

• HLS and DASH outputs using CMAF
• basic ladder generation based on input resolution
• bitrate caps and trimming redundant renditions
• different presets for VOD vs live use cases

It’s intentionally narrow, but already useful in real projects.

What It’s Not

• Not a wrapper that hides FFmpeg
• Not a “perfect ladder” generator
• Not a one-size-fits-all solution

If shell scripts work for you, that’s totally fine. This just fits better with how I like to structure Go services.

Source

The project is open source and here if you want to take a look: https://github.com/farshidrezaei/mosaic

I’d love feedback — especially from people who’ve wrestled with FFmpeg pipelines or ABR setups before.