Three Ways to Integrate FFmpeg with Bun for Video Processing

Developers building video processing features in Bun have three practical options for integrating FFmpeg, each with distinct tradeoffs. The first approach uses Bun's native Bun.spawn API to call a locally installed FFmpeg binary, which is fast but requires FFmpeg on every machine and is unsuitable for serverless environments. The second option, ffmpeg.wasm, runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly with no binary dependencies, though it is 10–20 times slower than native and struggles with large files. A third path involves sending video processing tasks to a cloud API via Bun's built-in fetch, eliminating both binary management and WASM performance penalties. The best choice depends on the deployment environment, performance requirements, and how much infrastructure complexity a developer is willing to manage.