When comparing ffmpeg vs KDENlive, the Slant community recommends KDENlive for most people. In the question“What are the best video encoding tools?” KDENlive is ranked 1st while ffmpeg is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose KDENlive is:
Kdenlive is licensed under GPLv2, and built on top of other open source projects like FFmpeg.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Cross-platform
Works on Linux, OS X and Windows.
Pro Powerful
In addition to having great flexibility over demuxer, decoder, processer, encoder, muxer choice and settings, ffmpeg can crop, stream, merge audio and video from different sources and perform many other tasks.
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under LGPL.
Pro Screen capture
You can use ffmpeg to record your desktop along with audio.
Pro Extensive list of formats supported
Among the more common formats ffmpeg can handle are h.264, HEVC(h.265), mp3, AAC, mpeg-4, wmv3, ProRes, QuickTime, SWF, Speex, FLAC, VP9 and many more. To get a full list in terminal type: ffmpeg-formats
Pro Excellent streaming support
Because ffmpeg allows transcoding on the fly and supports multiple streaming protocols such as rtmp, rtsp, http, ftp, hls, you can use it to stream to services such as twitch.tv or set up your own streaming solution.
You can use both local realtime recordings or another stream as a source, transcode it if necessary, and output it to a different stream.
ffmpeg -i rtmp://server/live/originalStream -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -vpre slow -f flv rtmp://server/live/h264Stream
Pro Open Source
Kdenlive is licensed under GPLv2, and built on top of other open source projects like FFmpeg.
Pro Works great as an audio editor
Audio is edited in the same way as video, which makes it one of the best audio editors.
Pro Surpisingly complete
Although this editor is not up with the top of the professional pack of editors, it certainly packs a powerful punch, and should provide enough features for amateur montages, ranging from alpha manipulation, to multiple audio and video live track editing.
Pro Its great for learn the basics of video-editing
Pro Subtitles included
Cons
Con Steep learning curve
Unless you use a front-end (that has reduced functionality), ffmpeg might be intimidating at first.
Con It's laggy and freezes, with some chance of crashing
Con Timeline cursor is not working
Timeline cursor is not working well on Kubuntu, very difficult to use it. You have to switch all the time between project monitor and clip monitor to get it work.
Con Dose not work well in Windows
They do not support windows well like other distribution. You will face a lot of problems.
Con No hardware acceleration
If you don't have a CPU that's good for video encoding, the render time can be quite bad.
Con Does not have good distribution channel
You have to go to their website to get newest version, does not auto update via package manager.
Con Doesn't support multi frame-rate video editing
When you choose the mixed frame rate option, your video with 60 fps will be broken (slow down and trimmed).
(This con might be just misunderstanding of how to do video editing and production from the user who typed in).