ffdash is a terminal UI for batch VP9/AV1 video encoding with hardware acceleration, real-time progress monitoring, and full control over quality settings. Made to work as a dashboard over SSH.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Batch processing – Encode entire directories with parallel workers, adjustable on the fly.
- Hardware acceleration – QSV, VA-API (Intel/AMD) and NVENC (NVIDIA >= Ada Lovelace) for fast encodes.
- Auto-VMAF calibration – Automatically tune quality to hit a target VMAF score.
- Encoding profiles – Save and load encoding presets for different use cases.
- Live dashboard – Real-time ETA, throughput, queue progress, and system stats.
- Full tunability – Rate control modes, quality presets, filters, GOP settings, audio options.
- Keyboard-first – Fast navigation, built-in help, SSH-friendly, mouse support.
- Dry-run preview – See exact FFmpeg commands before encoding.
Website: github.com/bcherb2/ffdash
Support:
Developer: ffdash contributors
License: MIT License

ffdash is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Video Converters | |
|---|---|
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| FastFlix | GUI for H.264, HEVC and AV1 hardware and software encoding |
| Videomass | Cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and youtube-dl |
| avconv | Part of libav-tools; fork of FFmpeg |
| VLC | Vdeo player which also converts multimedia to different formats |
| mpv | Cross-platform media player with video encoding support |
| ab-av1 | AV1 encoder with automatic quality selection through sample testing |
| MEncoder | MEncoder is included in MPlayer |
| FFQueue | Graphical frontend to FFmpeg written in C++ |
| Edconv | User-friendly FFmpeg GUI |
| transcode | Utility to encode raw video/audio streams |
| OmniGet | Uses FFmpeg to perform the video conversion |
| MystiQ | GUI for FFmpeg, a powerful media converter |
| Frame | Desktop media conversion utility |
| ffdash | VP9 video encoder |
| Constrict | Compress videos to target sizes |
| Leonardo | Media conversion application |
| Ciano | Easy way to convert your multimedia files to the most popular formats |
| Recoder | GTK4 video transcoding application |
| VidCom | Simple utility for video archiving and compression |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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